00:00:09.000Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, I have a great conversation with Gordon Chang, probably the leading China expert in the world who understands his issue better than anyone else so that we can clamp down on China's influence in our country.
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00:00:52.000Big interview in store with Gordon Chang.
00:01:09.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:17.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:09.000I have been very vocal, calling China our greatest enemy.
00:02:13.000I don't play games like some people in Washington where they say China is a foe or China is a rival.
00:02:18.000I just say they're an enemy of the United States and they should be treated as such.
00:02:22.000I think that for decades we have allowed the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate our society and our culture.
00:02:28.000Can you just give us a big picture update and then we'll get into issue by issue of where you think the Chinese Communist Party and the country of China are currently?
00:02:37.000Are they healthy economically, societally, and culturally?
00:02:41.000And just help us make sense of this outside of the propaganda that we'll likely see in the mainstream press.
00:02:50.000And we know this because May of last year, People's Daily, which is the most authoritative publication in China, ran a piece which said, people's war, quote unquote, people's war against the U.S.
00:03:44.000We see, for instance, Just a fundamental nature of the communist system where they're committing crimes against humanity, including genocide against the Uyghurs and the Kazakhs and other ethnic and religious minorities.
00:03:59.000So I don't know how else you put this.
00:04:02.000China is an enemy and they're going after us.
00:04:05.000Yeah, it's our greatest enemy, I would make the argument.
00:04:09.000And what's so different about the Chinese threat, and I want to unpack this with you, is that unlike other threats that we faced in the 20th century, this particular enemy has really embedded themselves into every single aspect of American culture through our media,
00:04:27.000by purchasing advertisements in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, through our tech companies, by trying to win good favor with them so they can create their own social censorship empire through Hollywood, through funding a lot of movies and distributing them throughout mainland China, through our sports, through very, let's say, suspicious deals with the National Basketball Association and the NBA's unwillingness to call out China's evil authoritarian practices.
00:04:53.000It seems, and in higher education, Confucius Institutes, we're at our last count, and we have done this at Turning Point USA because we're a campus-based organization.
00:05:01.000We've actually listed all the Confucius Institutes and the professors that are on CCP payroll, and we keep a weekly track of which ones are being closed, which ones are not being closed.
00:05:11.000And thankfully, we've put a lot of pressure on lawmakers.
00:05:14.000There's been over 30 that have closed in the last year, which is terrific.
00:05:17.000Can you speak about how the Chinese model is not about firing rockets at the United States?
00:05:24.000It's about getting into the fabric of our country and destabilizing us from within.
00:05:30.000Yeah, the Chinese talk about the three warfares, which is subversion, lawfare, and the rest of it.
00:05:37.000But, you know, you think about China's subversion of the United States, and it is from the top to the bottom.
00:05:44.000It's not only the Confucius Institutes you talk about, Confucius classrooms.
00:05:48.000It is supplying a lot of money in the forms of printing contracts, plus also advertisements in those papers that you were talking about.
00:05:56.000$19 million to U.S. publications over the course of two and a half years, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others.
00:06:06.000You know, we see a concerted effort on the part of China to do this.
00:06:10.000They've been doing it for decades, and they've made great inroads into it.
00:06:15.000And we have, you've got to remember, Charlie, that, yeah, the Chinese are villains, but this is our country.
00:06:20.000We could have stopped them from doing this, and we didn't do it.
00:06:24.000And finally, we have an administration that is going after the Chinese from the top to the bottom.
00:06:29.000And this is absolutely essential because of what they have done to try to undermine our society.
00:06:36.000And we got to remember one thing, just to put this in context.
00:06:40.000You know, a lot of people say, oh, you know, the Chinese are just competing with us.
00:06:44.000And I have no problem with the country competing with us.
00:06:47.000That's what happens within the Westphalian international system that goes back to 1648.
00:06:52.000What China is trying to do is not compete with us in this Westphalian system.
00:06:56.000What China is trying to do is to overthrow the Westphalian system and to replace it with something that the Chinese emperors were familiar with, which is worldwide Chinese rule.
00:07:06.000They call this Tianxia, or all under heaven.
00:07:09.000China's emperors had the right and they were compelled to rule all under heaven.
00:07:16.000So this is an existential challenge to the United States and to every other country on the planet.
00:07:21.000It's almost a, let's say, Chinese equivalent of the divine right of kings almost, that I have a right to rule the entire world, to make a comparison to a European historical example.
00:07:34.000And in some ways, it's very mercantilist in some ways, where they want to create a global empire.
00:07:41.000And so let's dive deeper, though, in the American side of it, because you're right, we could have stopped it.
00:07:46.000And we had Republican and Democrat presidents that were really either they were hypnotized or they were complicit with this agenda, especially on the issue of trade, that somehow it would benefit the United States of America completely and categorically if we deindustrialized our country.
00:08:04.000Now, what's really interesting is I came across your work in 2012, 2013, right when Mitt Romney was running for the presidency, and you were talking about how we need to be very firm against China.
00:08:16.000There were a lot of scholars that now have proven to be funded by certain Chinese companies and Chinese affiliates that would make the argument using pure libertarian thinking that it's actually a really good thing on comparative advantage that if our country sends all of our jobs overseas, and I used to believe this, and I couldn't be on the other, I couldn't be more on the other side of it now.
00:08:39.000Can you talk about how the ruling class has really, in both parties, has designed this system that has been more pro-China than pro-American?
00:08:49.000Yeah, this is the greatest mistake that the United States has made in the course of its history.
00:08:56.000What we tried to do, we started out with some like a very generous notion that we could integrate China into the international system.
00:09:05.000We're talking about a communist regime.
00:09:08.000And maybe one can say that in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, there was maybe some justification for this.
00:09:15.000You know, people talked about Francis Fukuyama talked about the end of history, all the rest of it.
00:09:21.000But it became pretty clear that China, as it traded with us, as we engaged China, as the word is, that really what we did was we strengthened a hostile regime.
00:09:33.000And instead of becoming benign, that regime became even more belligerent and hostile.
00:09:39.000The one thing that, you know, we talk about trade, and I can understand the notions of free trade and the rest of it.
00:09:46.000But ultimately, we got to remember that China does not believe in the notion of comparative advantage.
00:09:53.000And that underpins this whole idea of international commerce.
00:09:58.000So what we have done by, for instance, admitting China into the World Trade Organization, which occurred in 2001, was we allowed this into a free trade system.
00:10:08.000We allowed this completely mercantilist, criminal, and in many ways, criminal organization because they were stealing intellectual property.
00:10:17.000So that's the reason why, you know, China was able to make great progress because we were helping China to strengthen itself.
00:10:25.000And at some point, and we can argue about when we should have realized this, but certainly we're talking a long time ago.
00:10:32.000We should have realized that we needed to change course because China was not, the regime was not moving in the directions that everyone predicted.
00:10:41.000And we were told and we were promised by our leaders: the more we trade with them, the more Western they'll become.
00:10:48.000And a lot of Eastern European countries were used as an example as to how this can happen.
00:10:53.000You know, oh, look at Belarus and look at Poland.
00:10:56.000Eventually, if you trade with them, they'll all be wearing Levi jeans, taking selfies with iPhones, eating Big Macs, you know, in Minsk, and they'll love America, right?
00:11:06.000That was basically the thought process.
00:11:08.000Or look at Southeast Asia and look at Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia.
00:11:12.000However, we have learned that the more we trade with them, it's actually the opposite.
00:11:22.000And there are still people that are committed to this idea that we must just without any sort of tariffs or sanctions or interruption of the supply chain, continue this descent into the Chinese global empire being strengthened.
00:11:38.000And a lot of these people sometimes are more on the fundamentalist free market side.
00:11:45.000However, it's not good for any form of liberty if China gets stronger.
00:11:50.000I mean, if you love freedom, you should not want China to have any more power than they currently have.
00:11:55.000One thing that has always really interested me in your writings, though, Gordon, is how you have called out the BS of the Chinese banking system.
00:12:03.000It's a very nuanced, intricate point, but I actually completely agree.
00:12:08.000I think that their economic model is actually a house of cards waiting to collapse.
00:12:19.000China tries to present itself as sort of the inevitable wave.
00:12:22.000And they talk about a big economy growing bigger, eventually will overtake ours.
00:12:28.000And so there's this whole notion that this can't be stopped.
00:12:33.000But what we're seeing, what China has done is it's created a currency wall and all other walls, which have really permitted communist leaders in Beijing to set the rules and therefore administer the game.
00:12:47.000And what they've been able to do looks unsustainable.
00:12:51.000And eventually it will be, but they've gotten away with it for quite some time.
00:12:55.000They've also been benefited by this notion that we've just been talking about that the world should help China.
00:13:02.000So essentially what China has is a system which constantly requires money from the outside.
00:13:09.000And because of our engagement notions, we've been supplying that money in terms of trade, investment, technical cooperation, all the rest of it.
00:13:18.000Right now, the world is decoupling from China for a number of reasons.
00:13:22.000And we're starting to see the problems in the Chinese system become exposed.
00:13:27.000So for instance, even before the coronavirus epidemic, big Chinese companies were starting to default on their bonds.
00:13:34.000And smaller companies that didn't have access to the bond market were also doing that as well.
00:13:41.000Now, the coronavirus epidemic has shaken China, just like it's shaken our economy.
00:13:46.000But we're actually recovering a lot faster than China is because of just the nature of our system.
00:13:53.000Our system is everyone goes out and within the constraint of rules does what's best for themselves.
00:14:01.000The system is the Communist Party dictates outcomes.
00:14:05.000And in certain cases, they can do well.
00:14:08.000But right now, the policies of Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, are to go back to what was the early days of the People's Republic under Mao.
00:14:17.000It's totalitarianism, and it isn't working.
00:14:20.000And Chinese people themselves are starting to see this.
00:14:23.000Yeah, I want to follow up on that in one second.
00:14:25.000I'm actually really interested in that and the intelligence reports you might be hearing and seeing because I believe firmly that human beings have to fight endlessly for freedom.
00:14:37.000But if they live under tyranny for too long, they could be hypnotized that freedom doesn't even exist.
00:14:42.000They have to be introduced to the concept of freedom.
00:14:44.000And the Chinese Communist Party, the ruling class, they are concerned about the United States.
00:14:50.000They're concerned about other proxies worldwide.
00:14:53.000But the thing that worries them the most is the people of China rising up.
00:14:57.000And that is why the three T's are not allowed to be mentioned in China: Tiananmen Square, Tibet, and Taiwan.
00:15:04.000It could get you in prison forever because all three of those are independent examples of sovereignty, of a pushback against the Chinese Communist Party, of people rising up.
00:15:14.000So you just mentioned that the people are starting to wake up.
00:15:18.000I'd be really interested to hear that.
00:15:21.000Well, what's happened is, and this is a sort of a long historical process, but in the so-called reform era, which started at the end of 1978, you do have the Chinese people.
00:15:34.000This is the Chinese people demanding the right to have their own businesses, their own small plots on farms and all the rest of it.
00:15:43.000And what that's done is it created a new mentality.
00:15:46.000Now, Xi Jinping is trying to take away some of this economic latitude and autonomy of people.
00:15:53.000And this is really the push and the pull between the people and the party.
00:15:57.000But it wasn't the Communist Party that reformed China.
00:16:00.000It was the Chinese people demanding that they have the right to open up a little stall, to sell trinkets, to build knickknacks, to do whatever.
00:16:10.000And that's what's created this big push for growth.
00:16:15.000Now, Xi Jinping actually believes in a state-dominated economy, so he's moving back.
00:16:21.000And one other thing, the Communist Party is insecure.
00:16:25.000So they've started to put together this social credit system, and they hope to have, by the end of this year, have this system in place nationwide, which means that every Chinese resident gets a social credit score.
00:16:38.000And that score is constantly updated by observable behaviors.
00:16:42.000So for instance, if you jaywalk, your score will go down.
00:16:46.000If you say something nice about Xi Jinping, your score will go up.
00:16:49.000And those people with low scores, they can't send their kids to school.
00:16:57.000As Communist Party officials say, and they use these terms, they say that those who have low scores will not be able to take one step outside their doors.
00:17:08.000This is backed up by a plan, 626 million surveillance cameras in place by the end of this year.
00:17:19.000We're going back to totalitarianism in China, and they are well on that way, especially with this social credit system.
00:17:28.000I hope our listeners are internalizing this.
00:17:30.000First of all, the fact our media does not cover this just shows that they're bought and paid for by the CCP.
00:17:35.000Secondly, the fact that Hollywood has not dramatized this shows that they're bought and paid for by the CCP, because that is an incredible piece of cinema that could be created, right?
00:17:46.000I mean, you have Netflix series about how America is the worst country ever because of our history, which is nonsense, of course.
00:17:53.000But could you imagine one piece of cinema where that shows that, no, you're actually living through Black Mirror.
00:18:17.000I'm not saying that they can't have a very long rule, but I think eventually you cannot program human beings like automatons and put them into a social credit score.
00:18:28.000They're definitely betting on something that's never been done before.
00:18:31.000So are you saying, Gordon, that eventually this is going to come into some form of a collapse or a revolution?
00:18:38.000Or do you think that because of technology, the CCP will be able to make this happen?
00:19:14.000And that's the point that you just talked about, that it can't sustain itself indefinitely because people want things and the party stands unalterably opposed to those ambitions and aspirations.
00:19:28.000So I don't think this system is going to last very long.
00:19:33.000I mean, it's had the support, as we've been talking about, of foreign countries.
00:19:37.000But, you know, with President Trump, he has made it clear that he's adopting policies.
00:19:42.000You know, people say, oh, America first, whatever.
00:19:45.000But the point is that these policies are undermining China's economy and its system.
00:19:52.000And he's not afraid to call out the Chinese, unlike other people, unlike Hollywood, unlike newspapers, all the rest of it.
00:20:00.000So I think that we are going to see fundamental changes, largely because the world is following President Trump on this.
00:20:09.000And part of it is it's China is pushing so hard that countries have got to come to the realization that it's either them or China.
00:20:21.000And for us, to put that in the context of America, there's going to be one survivor.
00:20:26.000It's going to be the People's Republic of China or it's going to be the United States of America.
00:20:31.000Because of China's ideology, it can't be both.
00:20:34.000And that means we've got to defend our republic and make sure that it's freedom and democracy that survives, not communism and totalitarianism.
00:20:42.000Well, that's why the American left has found an ally in China, because they both hate America and they both hate liberty and freedom.
00:20:48.000And the American left, they love the Iranians because they hate America.
00:20:53.000They love the Chinese because they hate America.
00:20:56.000And they're happy to take money, to take all sorts of different, let's just say, benefits from these totalitarians because they are also totalitarians within the American left.
00:21:07.000I think that's a very important point that we have our own issue within our country of people that want to destabilize and destroy America.
00:21:15.000And they have created an alliance with the Chinese Communist Party.
00:21:18.000And the CCP, they consider the American left to be useful idiots.
00:21:24.000I mean, you think that if the American left got into power, you think the CCP would stop?
00:21:29.000I mean, that is beyond foolish, that kind of insurrection or that insurgency.
00:21:35.000The CCP would get exactly what they want, and then they would obliterate them as well.
00:21:39.000And so can you talk about what our listeners can actually do to help stop the rise of China?
00:21:44.000I talk about moral purchasing, stop buying things that are made in China, demand at your lawmakers that we put on sanctions with China.
00:21:53.000The way I look at it is we have basically cut off all trade with Iran, and we have heavy sanctions with Russia.
00:21:58.000Why would we not have sanctions on China after what they've done with the virus, the deindustrialization, South China Sea, Confucius Institutes, TikTok, digital surveillance, 1 million Muslims in concentration camps?
00:22:33.000We need to stop all of these technical cooperations, cooperation agreement.
00:22:37.000And it should be the policy of the United States to end the rule of the Communist Party.
00:22:42.000We can get along with China, but we can't get along with the Communist Party of China.
00:22:48.000And Charlie, just to put this into context, today we're speaking, there are 136,000 Americans that have died from the coronavirus.
00:22:57.000We got to remember that Xi Jinping took steps that inevitably led to the spread of this disease beyond China's borders.
00:23:06.000China admitted, and let me go into this just for a second, because I think it puts everything into perspective.
00:23:14.000China admitted that the coronavirus was human-to-human transmissible only on January 20.
00:23:20.000But doctors in Wuhan, the epicenter, knew about this no later than the second week of December.
00:23:25.000And if Chinese leaders had said nothing in that five weeks, that would have been grossly irresponsible.
00:23:30.000But what they tried to do was to convince the world that it was not human-to-human transmissible.
00:23:36.000And at the same time, Chinese leaders pressured other countries, including the United States, not to impose travel restrictions and quarantines.
00:23:46.000That meant a disease which was going to be just located only in the center part of China became a global pandemic affecting nearly every country in the world.
00:23:56.000And, you know, we look at this and we've got to say, I don't know what was in Xi Jinping's mind, but if he wanted to level the playing field after seeing what the coronavirus did to his own country, if he wanted to spread it beyond his borders, he would have done exactly what he did.
00:24:12.000And that should put into perspective for Americans what's at stake here.
00:24:16.000Today we talk, 136,000 Americans have died.
00:24:24.000And that is almost 50 times that of 9-11.
00:24:29.000Probably, that's about right, 45 times that of 9-11.
00:24:32.000And the death toll is going up, not to mention the economic damage, the displacement, all because the Chinese Communist Party did what they do best, which is lie.
00:24:58.000Do you see America getting honest and tough with the Chinese Communist Party, or do you anticipate more appeasement?
00:25:05.000And to kind of close it out, can you just give us what the consequences are if we don't get tough?
00:25:12.000Well, if we don't change our views of what's going on with China, if we don't defend our society, we're not going to have a society because China will continue its malicious attacks on us.
00:25:24.000And that means, you know, as we go into this election season, we need to be very, very get clear views from both candidates about what they intend to do about China.
00:25:37.000Because that, to me, is the central issue in the campaign.
00:25:41.000Yes, we've got things we've got to do in our own country, but we're Americans.
00:26:00.000And I also think that any individual that supports an organization that's in bed with the CCP, you are then complicit with the CCP.
00:26:08.000And we know from how we treated the Soviet Union back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s that a posture and a policy of icing them out, of being strong and tough, sanctions do work, and just limitlessly deindustrializing our country and sending hundreds of billions of dollars of capital flow to the enemy that killed indirectly 136,000 Americans with 10 million jobs that have been lost just from manufacturing, 20 million from the Chinese coronavirus,
00:26:38.000not to mention the infiltration in our country.
00:26:40.000At what point are we going to get wise to their infiltration in American society?
00:26:47.000It is America's greatest enemy for someone who's 26 years old.
00:26:50.000I know very clearly, I see where this is headed.
00:26:53.000If we do not get decisive and not just tough, but we have to get aggressive with China, 15 years from now, America will be the backseat driver on the world stage.
00:27:03.000China will be the main cultural, just let's say, conductor of what's happening.
00:27:10.000And we'll no longer have a republic that we enjoy because the Chinese Communist Party, as you say, they think that they can control everything under the sun.
00:27:42.000He stood for freedom and democracy, and we know what happened.
00:27:46.000This is absolutely critical for us Americans to go back.
00:27:50.000to understand what happened and why we have our freedoms today, because it was somebody named Ronald Reagan who did not accept the Soviet Union, who didn't see it as legitimate, who decided he would defend our republic.
00:28:05.000And the harder, the harsher we get on China, the more we're going to realize there are incredible allies in Asia that are waiting for us to do this.
00:28:12.000Japan, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, India, they will come and they will thank us tremendously.
00:28:19.000And any sort of benefit we get from China, whether it be if you absolutely need to manufacture something in Asia, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam have incredible capacity to do what China does probably even, you know, I would say even more cost-efficiently than China.
00:28:34.000I don't think there's any economic benefit anymore dealing with China.
00:28:51.000The leverage in their banking system, the debasing of their currency, they will collapse.
00:28:56.000And you actually might see China break into a couple different countries, or you might see China actually have some form of a fair and free election or leader.
00:29:06.000But you made a great point earlier, and I know we're low on time, which is they're insecure.
00:29:10.000And that's a very important point because Stalin and Lenin and Mao, all of these individuals that wanted to create themselves as gods, if you really study the people that did biographies on them, they died as insecure individuals.
00:29:24.000They never were able to have total and complete peace about their authoritarianism.
00:29:30.000And by the way, the CCP probably is going to watch this interview.
00:29:33.000I hope they do, because I hope that they realize they're going to lose, and we are going to win, because we have truth and light and liberty on our side, and they have darkness and authoritarianism.
00:30:13.000What a great conversation that was with Gordon Chang.
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