The sheen of civility with which China opportunistically presents itself masks a dreadful reality. It is illogical to assume that a dystopian communist surveillance state with vast imperial ambitions and an entrenched plan to subvert the U.S.-oriented world order will significantly change course because of economic or diplomatic “engagement.” China has, in fact, stepped up repression, grey zone attacks, and hard power provocations despite engagement. When China seeks an apparent “warming” in U.S.-China relations, as it did at the recent APEC Summit, it is usually to ease pressure on its economy, human rights violations, and expansionist foreign policy. It defies reason to think that an aggressive dictator like Xi Jinping wants a sustained détente with the United States.

Trying to keep channels of communication open between Chinese and American citizens and leaders makes good sense, but not when the effort and resultant “talks” lead to unwise concessions and not at the price of indifference to human rights. Too often, the veneer of congeniality and attempts to win the cooperation of adversaries lead to complacent or even enabling policies. Yet, what the Free World requires now is a sense of urgency about deterring the serious threat China poses to our security and way of life. What the multitude of people severely oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) need now is for free people to react and speak out. China’s ever more menacing and emboldened stance in the world, ever more cruel and draconian authoritarianism, and ever more extensive dissemination of anti-American propaganda put both the power and the principles of the United States at stake.

The lingering hope that, once China realizes the economic benefits of opening up to the West and interacting with open-minded Westerners, more political freedom and less military ambition will follow has been overtaken by reality. After it was granted permanent normal trade relations with the United States and entrance into the World Trade Organization, China increasingly gamed the system, reaping economic spoils while cracking down on dissent and putting profits into state-dominated companies and weapons of war. China collaborated with U.S. corporations and universities to acquire advanced technology and intellectual property. From 2001 to 2021, China’s economy grew by 1,200 percent, and China became the world’s largest exporter. But China’s dramatic rise and domination of manufacturing paralleled surging imperial ambitions, a massive military buildup, and, eventually, a return to Maoist-level repression.

In the Wall Street Journal, Select Committee on China Chair Representative Mike Gallagher highlighted President Joe Biden’s assertion in Vietnam in September, “I think China has a difficult economic problem right now…I don’t think it’s going to cause China to invade Taiwan. And, as a matter of fact the opposite—it probably doesn’t have the capacity that it had before.” Yet, observed Gallagher, “Building a first-class military and reclaiming Taiwan are among President Xi Jinping’s priorities. Even if the economy sags and Mr. Xi has to cut back in other areas, the military will get the funds it needs.” Gallagher added that Putin invaded Ukraine in spite of economic pain and that the Great Depression did not stop imperial Japan from instigating war in the Pacific.

Neither the prospect of economic pain nor economic gain will stop the CCP’s drive for totalitarian authority and a dramatic revision of the post-World War order. Xi Jinping and the CCP view these goals as irrevocable. Instead of compromising our moral, strategic, and military position because of the desire for wealth, temporary peace, and repose, we should use China’s multiplying economic problems as leverage while recognizing that financial incentives and disincentives will only go so far. The utmost priorities for the Free World—security and rights—are compromised when America indulges in wishful thinking.

Witness the credulity and enthusiasm of the Biden administration and especially of U.S. business leaders surrounding the recent APEC summit in San Francisco. The summit allowed Xi to be seen on an equal footing with the U.S. president on the world stage and was the perfect platform for image-building. Moreover, Xi played China’s quintessential trump card with the West: the profit motive. He received a standing ovation from executives after alluding to China’s “super-large economy and super-large market” and terming China a “partner and friend.” So he, too, demonstrated China’s ability to turn the West’s characteristic eagerness for “peaceful co-existence” into unprincipled or unwise concessions.

Biden agreed to lift sanctions on a Chinese police institute implicated in Orwellian surveillance, detention and torture, and even “population genetics” against Uyghurs in exchange for Xi agreeing to help stop the flow of Chinese precursor chemicals and fentanyl into the United States by way of Mexico. This agreement might look reasonable on the surface. Still, Xi could already have cracked down on Chinese companies profiting from the fentanyl killing American youths and devastating American communities, and Biden was already downplaying human rights for the sake of smoother relations. Biden deserves credit for pursuing the re-start of military-to-military talks with China, but he probably should not have agreed to “intergovernmental dialogue” on artificial intelligence since that makes it likely that loopholes in U.S. export restrictions will continue; among many chilling findings of the DOD’s 2023 China Military Power Report is that China is focused on “dominating artificial intelligence for warfare.”

As if to mock the theater of it all, while elites met behind closed doors in San Francisco, Chinese agents harassed and even assaulted anti-CCP protestors on San Francisco’s streets. It turns out that the Chinese government paid CCP supporters to wave Chinese flags to welcome Xi Jinping to the city. On November 29, Representative Gallagher and ranking China committee member Raja Krishnamoorthi requested information from the Justice Department on the “violent assault of peaceful pro-democracy protestors … by CCP-aligned agents during Xi Jinping’s visit.” Similarly tragicomic, as the conference was underway, evidence emerged that a recently exposed “biolab” in California, producing dangerous substances and run by Chinese nationals, had received $2 million in wire transfers from Chinese banks. And, the very same week, a Chinese warship used sonar to harass and injure Australian Royal Navy divers.

Indeed, in the aftermath of APEC, there are no signs that China plans to stem its military aggression. Coercive tactics and expansive illegal claims in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and the Indian Ocean continue. A Chinese official even warned Taiwan not to take reports of a softening stance toward “Taiwan independence” seriously. China has actually intensified its bullying of the Philippines. The nation’s Coast Guard said the number of Chinese maritime militia vessels near the Julian Felipe Reef had increased from 111 in November to more than 135 such vessels “swarming” the area this month. In another telling indicator, Chinese naval ships in the Horn of Africa failed to respond to a distress call from an Israeli-owned tanker that came under attack by Somali pirates on November 26. Also in late November, in classic cases of deflection, China said it “drove away” a U.S. warship conducting a freedom of navigation exercise near the Paracel Islands, calling the United States the “biggest destroyer of peace and stability” in the region. Then, on December 4, China claimed that a U.S. Navy ship traversing international waters in the West Philippine Sea had “illegally intruded.”

The Pentagon reports that China’s overall military might is on a trajectory to surpass the United States; that China now has the world’s largest Navy and fully intends to take Taiwan, that China’s nuclear buildup is “exceeding previous projections;” that China appears to be building an intercontinental missile system that could threaten the continental United States, Hawaii and Alaska; and that China is weaponizing space. Engagement, of course, has done nothing to slow China’s massive military expansion. Moreover, Xi Jinping is expanding, not contracting, the drive to “sinicize” ethnic minorities and religions as indicated by the increasing crackdown on mosques as well as on churches. And the CCP continues to deploy ever-more totalitarian methods of surveillance, censorship, and control. Another reporter from Hong Kong has gone missing in China. So much for the heralded “thaw” in U.S.-China relations.

Although many Western companies are exiting China due to personal and geopolitical risks and the State-dominated economy’s burdensome regulations, many others still find China’s gigantic market irresistible and make harmful compromises for the sake of it. (The Free Beacon reports, for example, that Microsoft helped CCP-run media outlets disseminate propaganda.) While the United States has ratcheted pressure on China through AUKUS, Five Eyes intelligence-sharing, and other agreements, the Biden administration nevertheless conveys dangerous ambivalence regarding sanctions and deterrence. While Congress’s Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and Taiwan Protection Act are good, Congress also broadcasts ambivalence. The House Financial Services Committee is pushing back against enhanced outbound investment screening backed by the House Foreign Affairs and House and Senate Armed Services committees.

Americans must be smarter about the technology they import as well as export. China-owned TikTok is a security risk due to the destabilizing and generally pro-China narratives it spreads and the data it collects on Americans. The House Select Committee on China insists “Congress must act with urgency” to ban TikTok, which “is perhaps the largest scale malign influence operation ever conducted.” China-owned Temu and Shein, which are massively expanding their presence in the U.S. market, should be monitored as well for disinformation, forced labor, and other potential abuses. Even more concerning, America’s large deficit relative to China’s in minerals and components key to advanced technology, medications, and even weapons systems exposes dangerous dependence on Chinese supply chains in critical areas. It would be a grave error to do too little too late to address these vulnerabilities.

Although many universities and organizations are finally finding a conscience and a backbone about where collaborative research with China might lead, many others are a long way from taking the threat seriously. A recent article, for example, reports that European researchers have, in recent years, collaborated with Chinese counterparts in areas such as “cross-ethnicity face anti-spoofing recognition,” “negative mental state monitoring,” and “integrated missile guidance.” Numerous U.S. universities have been exposed for receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from China, which they never reported.

If all of this, along with the China-Russia-Iran axis and China’s alignment with anti-American dictators and forces across the globe, and relentless attempts to turn countries and regional and international organizations against the United States are not enough for an urgent reckoning with hard truths, what about China’s dystopian and subversive tactics? These signals should send a chill down everyone’s spine about the prospect of a world in which China, rather than the United States, is the most influential power.

To wit, China’s severe human rights violations against Uyghurs and Tibetans and persecution of Christians, Falun Gong adherents, dissidents, and democracy advocates call for the Free World’s attention. The “National Security Law” stamping out freedom in Hong Kong is the real face of the globalization of the Chinese Communist Party. China’s attempt to erase Uyghur identity is genocidal; sinister methods include total surveillance, detention, torture, rape, forced labor, and even forced abortions in camps and prisons. Perhaps cruelest of all, China is forcibly taking Uyghur and Tibetan children from their families and homes to place them in “boarding schools,” where they are indoctrinated into Han-Chinese, Chinese-Communist thinking and drilled in militaristic preparation for war.

China’s national strategy of military-civil fusion has made biology a priority, with China exploring the Brave New World frontiers of “brain control” weapons, military uses of biomaterials, “gene editing,” and the “intersection of biotechnology and artificial intelligence.” Representative Gallagher has proposed an amendment to the annual defense bill that would ban federal agencies from giving taxpayer dollars to China’s largest genomics company, the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), which has been pursuing the application of biotechnology to warfare, including “ethnic genetic attacks.” And, it turns out that BGI is providing genetic testing equipment in the U.S. as part of what the Washington Post called China’s “drive to sweep up DNA from across the planet.”

China is engaged in “cognitive domain warfare” and aggressive propaganda as part of its global “political warfare strategy.” The House Select Committee on China has released an important document highlighting the CCP’s United Front work, which targets groups outside China, including Chinese nationals, with influence operations, pressure tactics and threats, and intelligence activities. Relatedly, China is implicated in major cyber attacks and sabotaging infrastructure in democracies. Taiwan said it was likely Chinese ships that cut two of Taiwan’s submarine internet cables in February. Microsoft warned in May that Chinese hackers had compromised “critical” cyber infrastructure in a variety of industries and government organizations. And Finland reports that “everything indicates” that a Chinese ship intentionally damaged a Baltic pipeline in October.

There are no viable substitutes for forging formidable defenses and alliances, re-building America’s lagging defense industrial base, and responding without equivocation to cyber attacks and disinformation, military provocations and threats, atrocities, and transnational repression. We saw Russia’s World War II-style buildup along the Ukraine border for months and still placed faith in “diplomatic off-ramps.” Will we do the same as China amasses forces along others’ maritime and territorial borders? It is never a good idea to underestimate an adversary. Nor is it wise to overestimate the fruits of engagement. Neither China’s current economic woes nor its vast market for profit, nor the occasional diplomatic niceties, should become excuses for responding inadequately and belatedly to China’s threat to the free world’s security, ideals, and way of life.

About the Author 

Anne R. Pierce is an author of books and articles on American presidents, American foreign policy, and American society. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, is an appointed member of Princeton University’s James Madison Society, and was a Political Science Series Editor for Transaction Publishers. Follow her @AnneRPierce.

Image: Shutterstock.com.