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March 8, 2025 - Epoch Times
22:08
How the CCP Seeks Global Hegemony: Piero Tozzi
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On the one hand, while they will present a friendly face to us and they'll send us cute panda bears to the Washington National Zoo, they're telling their people that America is the enemy.
I think one thing we can be very grateful to Xi Jinping about is that the mask is off, whether it's the wolf warrior diplomacy, the aggression towards Taiwan, towards the Philippines, and we call it the South China Sea, maybe we should start calling it the West Philippine Sea.
Are we finally seeing a real pivot to Asia as the Trump administration signals a dramatic reduction in the U.S. military presence in Europe and demands NATO allies pitch in more for Europe's defense?
Joining me today is longtime China expert Piero Totsi, staff director of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, the CECC. There's forced labor in the fishing, but there's also forced labor in the fish processing.
Well, this enters...
The U.S. supply chain, including our procurement by our Defense Department, served on military bases, but also U.S. Department of Agriculture purchases for federal prisons and school lunch programs.
The U.S. government should be setting the example in cleansing our supply chain of products that are tainted by forced labor.
It should be a no-brainer.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Well, very good to be here, Jan.
Thank you for inviting me.
Vice President J.D. Vance recently at the Munich Security Conference gave a speech.
Some people hailed it.
Others find it incredibly controversial and criticized it.
A lot of focus on free speech.
But that wasn't the only focus.
And how do you read it?
Well, I think...
Germain to our conversation today, I think we're seeing a pivot to Asia.
And that's something that's been talked about for some time.
President Obama spoke about it as well.
And with this administration, we're seeing a realization, a reprioritization of where does America need to put its assets?
And I think it's an understanding that...
The People's Republic of China, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping, is not simply a strategic rival.
We're not simply competing with them on economics, even militarily, but rather they're what I would call a systemic rival.
In other words, they seek to be hegemon and to As part of that, they seek to undo the entire rules-based international order and supplant it with one of their own devising, which I think accounts for their not just military aggressiveness, But also you see this effort to set standards.
It's the hegemon that sets the standards, whether it's in technology, whether it's seeking to undermine the dollar as the reserve currency, and you see that, I think, with BRICS and issues like the petroyen.
But you also see it in the area of human rights.
You see the CCP, the PRC, putting forward this notion of a shared common destiny for mankind.
Changing of rights as we think of it as principally about protecting individuals, individual freedoms, and transforming into collective rights, a right to development.
And if you look at the Universal Periodic Review of China last year, January of 2024, we had a number of countries that lined up to praise China as a rights leader, whereas the U.S. and like-minded countries, we had a number of countries that lined up to praise China as a rights leader, whereas the U.S. and like-minded countries, including our East Asian allies like Japan and
So I think there's an attempt to, as the PRC seeks hegemony, as the CCP, and I think here it's important to make that distinction between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese nation, the Chinese people, They seek to conflate that, but really their goals are systemic.
It can be very hard to imagine because basically since Tiananmen, Americans have been Hand over fist, trying to get into China, do anything, transfer all the necessary IP, offer all the technology voluntarily, invest insane amounts into places where it didn't look like a quick return was coming.
How do you explain this?
Well, that, I think, goes to the whole kind of mistake of engagement theory.
And if you want to talk a little about the Congressional Executive Commission on China, how do we come about?
If you look at post-Tiananmen, there was a realization that the regime was brutal.
China's most favored nation status in terms of trade was up for annual review.
They had to show that they were making improvements in human rights, and then it was reauthorized.
Bill Clinton, when he was candidate Bill Clinton, rightfully criticized George H.W. Bush.
After Tiananmen and the massacre there, George H.W. Bush sent Brent Scowcroft to Beijing to reassure them that, okay, everything will be all right.
And Clinton had that famous phrase, he's coddling butchers from Beijing to Baghdad.
But then what happened in 1994?
Bill Clinton delinked that annual review process and human rights and basically gave them permanent normal trade relations status.
There were a number of voices that criticized that, including Chris Smith.
He very presciently said that this is a mistake.
We're mistaking the nature of the regime.
Nancy Pelosi was another critic at that time.
Anyway, over the decade of the 1990s, you had this lead-up towards...
The PRC's accession to the World Trade Organization, which is, I think, in many ways how we really started to give up the store then.
The idea that you could take a regime that is mercantilist, it's a communist command economy that's able to devote resources to particular, not just industries, but particular companies.
It's able to subsidize Low prices through the use of forced slave labor and also steals intellectual property, to give it an upper hand, if you look at the Canadian company Nortel.
It's how Huawei was arguably constructed at the beginning.
That's Huawei's rise to power.
It cannibalized another telecom company that was so eager to get into the China market.
So that was a mistake that was made.
As part of that WTO accession, the Congressional Executive Commission on China was created to monitor.
China's human rights record.
And ironically, part of it was to kind of map its progress towards a rule of law society, which again kind of shows that heady optimism at the time, but also to maintain a political prisoner database and to keep Congress informed.
What people thought would be progress now, I think it's very clear, is regress.
And the abuse of human rights is ongoing and systematic.
All along through this, the Chinese regime was teaching the Chinese people over generations that America is the enemy.
Like, we just didn't notice that somehow?
Well, again, I think they present one face to the rest of the world, and that was especially true during the Reform era.
You know, when they want to attract foreign direct investment.
And so they present one face to the rest of the world, and then it's a very different message to their own people.
I think one thing we can be very grateful to Xi Jinping about is that the mask is off, whether it's the wolf warrior diplomacy, whether it's, you know, the aggression towards Taiwan, towards the Philippines.
We call it the South China Sea.
Maybe we should start calling it the West Philippine Sea.
That aggressiveness towards India on its border, I think the mask is off.
And its intentions are much clearer for those that want to see.
And we're also seeing, I think, a withdrawal of...
Western companies, Western law firms that have realized that this was a bad bargain that was made.
Still, however, it's difficult to extricate yourself.
If you're a company like Microsoft or Apple, not only is a great deal of your production in China, but also that's where your research and development...
We've outsourced so much to a country, again, that seeks to be the hegemon and also seeks to foster this spirit of grievance and hostility towards the United States, too.
So, Pierre, are you telling me that you're going to be submitting a recommendation to the White House for the renaming of another body of water?
I think that they don't need my input to do that.
But it's funny, you know, it's not even called the South China Sea in Chinese.
It's the South Sea.
Yet we do oftentimes adopt this terminology that favors them.
We talked about Calling Xi Jinping president when the word in Chinese is not president.
We should give him his party title.
We also adopt language like the South China Sea.
So in some ways, we're doing their own propaganda for them, which raises an interesting role.
A very prominent example in the other direction was the renaming of Wuhan virus.
The thing that you're really getting me thinking about is...
This, you know, these two faces being shown, right?
One internally, one externally.
I mean, there's this whole approach, I mean, since officially, I guess, since I think it's 2013, of the use of the three warfares, psychological warfare, public opinion warfare, and legal warfare, to attack the West.
I think the roots of that are very deep.
Another Chinese thinker, Sun Tzu, that people are familiar with.
You want to defeat an enemy ideally without combat, without any casualties.
So that's the roots of it.
But if you look at the United Front or United Front Works Department activities, since the inception of the Chinese Communist Party, they attempted to influence.
The Guomindang, infiltrate the Guomindang.
I think Mao talked about it as his secret weapon.
It's, in many ways, he attributed it to what allowed them to defeat the Guomindang in mainland China and to come to power.
The nationalists.
The nationalists, the KMT, the Chiang Kai-sheks.
Right.
That struggle, if you want to personify it, Mao Zedong versus Chiang Kai-shek, but it really was more than just a clash of titans.
It was the very alternative visions of what China's future would look like.
And the Kuomintang in 1949 fled to Taiwan.
So to give an example of United Front activity just very recent here in Washington, D.C., two examples.
There were two United Front operatives who were welcomed with open arms by here in Washington just a few weeks ago.
And there were two panda bears, Baoli and Qingbao.
And if you look at the media coverage, You know, these cute and wonderful panda bears, full of praise and a gift of the People's Republic of China.
A little bit of irony there.
Baoli and Qingbao, you know, we see their, you know, pinion, romanized words.
Chinese love puns.
A lot of Chinese dissidents use puns to kind of express their criticism of the Chinese Communist Party leadership.
However, it goes two ways.
Baoli is a homonym for violence, explosive violence.
Qingbao can mean intelligence in the sense of like spy craft, intelligence gathering.
So one wonders if sort of the joke is on us there.
The other example of United Front kind of...
You're trying to create goodwill towards China, was the Kennedy Center, which is a taxpayer-funded venue, hosting the National Ballet of China.
And Chris Smith led a letter, along with Congressman Molinar from the Select Committee.
Chris Smith is the chairman of the Congressional Executive Commission on China.
He wrote to the Kennedy Center and called attention to the fact that the CCP suppresses We're all in favor of artistic expression, and we don't want to be censorious here.
But I think what the letter called for is, like, will you let your audiences know that there are artists that are repressed in China, but also here?
You know, this long arm of transnational oppression.
To give an example, Chen Weiming is a Chinese sculptor who had a sculpture in California.
There's this Liberty Sculpture Park that contains a lot of his artwork.
And one of them was the CCP virus, and it showed Xi Jinping as a CCP virus, essentially.
A month after it was opened, it was burned down, and the FBI investigated, and it turns out there were agents of the Chinese Communist Party that did that and attacked that form of artistic expression.
So you see, for example, most egregiously, at the APEC conference in San Francisco last year, how demonstrators against Xi Jinping were beaten by pro- They were exercising their First Amendment freedoms.
They were permitted in San Francisco.
Prominent example, I'm just thinking because I've been covering it quite a bit recently.
There was two Chinese agents that were actually found guilty of trying to bribe IRS agents to revoke Shen Yun Performing Arts tax-exempt status, and then never mind the bomb threats and death threats and things to theaters to try to, since we're talking about the arts, right, at the Kennedy Center.
Yeah, yeah.
And again, the United Front activities, it really, you see the long arm of that.
You see these Chinese police stations, illicit police stations in major American cities.
We also see examples of how they try to infiltrate our political system.
Linda Sun, who was arrested, who had been an advisor to Governor Hochul, too, and sought to curate information that the governor received and also blocked, for example, So you see this targeting.
In order to influence, whether it's the IRS there or whether it's U.S. politicians, broad base of United Front activities.
Piero, one quick sec.
We're going to take a break.
Okay.
And we'll be right back.
And we're back with the Staff Director of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, Piero Tazi.
What I'm thinking to myself as we're discussing all this...
I think that deep down inside, the Chinese regime and its leadership understands that it's illegitimate.
And I think the thing that it fears the most of anything is actually accountability by its own people because of the terrible things it has done to them.
What do you think?
A hundred percent.
It goes to the question of legitimacy.
And we don't want to engage in regime change.
That really is for the Chinese people to do.
At the same time, however, we should not be subsidizing tyranny.
U.S. companies that have forced labor in their supply chain, which is in violation of U.S. law, like the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act or the Tariff Act, these companies have to be accountable for that.
We partner with PLA companies.
We saw it recently with CATL, the Chinese battery manufacturer, CATL, not cows.
These are PLA entities.
So what we should be doing is enforcing our laws there.
there.
And I think as this greater awareness, you're seeing this effort to move out of China, move your production out of China.
You saw a company like Milwaukee Tool, for example, that was accused of having forced labor in a supply chain.
It...
China does its equipment manufacturing in the United States now, but it also moved, like it's for work gloves and things like that, out of China to Cambodia in response to these allegations.
So you're seeing American companies disengage because they realize that there's a risk with doing business in China.
I think there's more that we can do.
I mean, one thing I would like to see is the securities and exchange The 1934 Securities Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5 that's promulgated under that concerns any statement, well, not just any statement by a publicly traded company.
It prohibits material misstatements, but also material omissions.
So if you're a publicly traded company, And you're not disclosing the fact that your supply chains are corrupted and tainted by forced labor, then that is a potential violation of the Securities Exchange Act, because it can affect the stock price of the corporation.
At the moment, if you're a publicly traded Chinese company through this...
Strange Cayman Islands instrument.
You don't even really have to submit a meaningful audit.
Well, so there are a couple of issues there.
I'm talking about American companies in particular that have corrupted supply chains, but there also is this idea of Chinese companies having access to U.S. capital markets.
That's another area where we should draw a line.
And that's, I think, a tool that hasn't been fully utilized.
We should not be rewarding these companies.
But I'll give you another example.
U.S. government purchases.
So, you know, Ian Urbina, who testified at a CECC hearing and had that wonderful series in The New Yorker looking at the fish supply chain.
You have forced labor on these fishing boats, these Chinese fishing boats, which oftentimes double as naval militia, by the way, and we see their actions.
The West Philippine Sea, South China Sea, there where they oftentimes swarm Filipino vessels.
So there's forced labor in the fishing, but there's also forced labor in the fish processing.
You have Uyghurs and North Korean women, mostly women, that are basically forced to process these fish.
Well, this enters the U.S. supply chain, including our...
Procurement by our Defense Department, served on military bases, but also USDA, U.S. Department of Agriculture purchases for prisons, federal prisons and school lunch programs.
So what we should be doing is, you know, the U.S. government should be setting the example and cleansing our supply chains of products that are tainted by forced labor.
So that's kind of, should be a no-brainer there.
And again, it's done in violation of U.S. law.
Well, Piero Totsi, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Well, thank you, Jan.
It's good to see you.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining Piero Totsi and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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