On the menu today: Xi Jinping has left Washington, and the U.S. is left with a joint communique declaring that we remember working together during World War II. The People’s Republic of China, however, continues its policies of opposing and undermining American interests on every front possible. Read on.
China Is a Threat to the United States
During Xi Jinping’s visit to the White House last week, the honor guard positioned on the roof of the West Wing Colonnade held both American and Chinese flags. While displaying both nations’ flags is standard for any state visit, placing an honor guard carrying a foreign country’s flag atop the West Wing itself was a departure from typical practice.
For the second time in this presidency, uniformed members of the armed services got on their hands and knees to smooth out the red carpet before a visiting autocrat.
President Trump’s toast to Xi at the state dinner Thursday night:
For Americans, we inherit a legacy of faith from Jerusalem to Rome, the democracy of ancient Athens, the triumphs of Sparta, and the freedom proclaimed in Philadelphia 250 years ago. As the leaders of our two nations, President Xi and I both understand that we represent different systems, but the ties between our people endure and we’ve never gotten along better.
Regarding “legacies of faith,” Christian churches that do not recognize the supremacy of the state are oppressed in China. It is terrific that China released Pastor Ezra Jin earlier this year, but eight of his colleagues from his church remain in prison. The Chinese government has “long restricted the religious freedom of the country’s Catholics, who are permitted to worship only in official churches under the government-run Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. . . . [Chinese authorities are] arbitrarily detaining, forcibly disappearing, torturing, and subjecting underground Catholic bishops and priests to house arrest.”
As for the president’s claim that “we’ve never gotten along better,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation does not agree:
The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.
Confronting this threat is the FBI’s top counterintelligence priority.
To be clear, the adversary is not the Chinese people or people of Chinese descent or heritage. The threat comes from the programs and policies pursued by an authoritarian government.
The Chinese government is employing tactics that seek to influence lawmakers and public opinion to achieve policies that are more favorable to China.
At the same time, the Chinese government is seeking to become the world’s greatest superpower through predatory lending and business practices, systematic theft of intellectual property, and brazen cyber intrusions.
The problem is not merely the president’s habitual hyperbolic effusive praise for Xi; we’ve long since gotten used to that. (2018: “President Xi and I will always be friends, no matter what happens.”) No, the problem is our president’s approach to Xi is all red carpets, bowing and scraping, and sucking up, with no discernible policy concessions on China’s part. (No, two new pandas don’t count.) The so-called “Eight Deliverables” out of this summit included agreements to attend the “APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting and the G20 Summit” and “the two heads of state recall that China and the U.S. were allies in World War II and fought side by side to win the war.”
Well, that’s nice.
Our countries were indeed allied against Imperial Japan, although tensions existed even during the war. Today, the Chinese government teaches its citizens that the Chinese Communist Party and Mao defeated Imperial Japan, not the Chinese Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-Shek, nor the United States, which really ought to get the lion’s share of the credit.
Meanwhile, away from the photo opportunities . . .
- Since the start of the year, China has sent Iran around 1,300 shipments of “dual-use” components, including electronics that can be used in drones and missile guidance systems.
- In July, a Chinese arms manufacturer shipped up to 400 shoulder-fired air-defense missile launchers to the Iranian regime under a deal worth at least $60 million.
- Chinese entities provided the Iranian military with high-resolution satellite images of a U.S. military base in Jordan before an attack that killed three U.S. troops in July. Recent American intelligence assessments concluded that the satellite imagery and intelligence support from China have played a role in “dramatic improvement in Iranian targeting capabilities over the past several months.”
- Since the start of the conflict on March 1, the Chinese government has assisted the Iranian regime in evading sanctions, and aided it by purchasing Iranian oil and supporting Iran’s access to critical technology for nuclear research and ballistic-missile development. By April, China was buying “nearly every drop of oil that Iran produces” and worked with Iran to expand “one of the world’s largest sanctions-evasion networks.”
- The Chinese government “has taken possession of potentially sensitive F-35 stealth aircraft parts that were inexplicably diverted to Hong Kong while being sent to the US from Australia, people briefed on the incident said. . . . [The parts] were coated with radar-absorbing material that enhances their stealth capabilities.”
- In late August, the U.S. Department of Justice “exposed a major alleged Chinese cyber-espionage campaign they say has compromised or attacked numerous federal agencies including NASA, the Federal Reserve, the departments of Justice and Energy and the US Senate. Hackers affiliated with the Chinese military and intelligence services allegedly used a Chinese tech company to try to cover their tracks, burrow into target networks and make their attacks more efficient. Other targets include US military networks, hospitals, power companies and defense contractors.”
- Also in August, the U.S. Space Force commander, General Stephen Whiting, warned in a speech that “China continues a breathtaking phase of space and counter-space development, to include a robust suite of counter-space weapons to blind and deafen U.S. forces by disrupting and destroying satellites. These include direct ascent anti-satellite weapons, ground-based lasers, jammers, maneuverable co-orbital anti-satellite systems and dual-use satellites. The speed with which China is moving to improve its space capabilities is the ongoing greatest challenge to the Space Command mission.”
- In early September, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, National Security Agency, and FBI warned that Chinese AI companies were targeting U.S. AI companies to systematically extract proprietary models. “Likely with Chinese government awareness, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens across millions of exchanges/requests from U.S. frontier AI models, including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, since at least late 2024. The distillation tactics used by China-based AI companies violate the U.S. companies’ terms of service and shorten AI research development for the China-based companies, undermining fair competition.”
- Last year, S. officials accused a Chinese company, Chang Guang Satellite Technology, of “directly supporting” attacks by the Houthis against U.S. interests.
- Chinese aggression against U.S. allies in the Pacific like the Philippines, Australia, and Japan has steadily ratcheted up in Trump’s second term:
There is a pattern to this uptick in aggressive acts. China began probing American allies soon after a meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Busan in October 2025, escalated its activities in March as America became bogged down in the Persian Gulf, and has gone even further since Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi held a summit in Beijing in May. “It’s a test of how much Washington is going to react and defend its allies in the region,” says Huong Le Thu of the International Crisis Group, a think-tank with headquarters in Brussels. Yet over the same period relations between China and America have improved. China, say Asian diplomats, is betting that Mr Trump won’t do anything to upset that trend, much less tell China to leave its allies alone.
- In March, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its annual threat assessment and concluded, “China aims to dominate its region and challenge Washington’s leadership, promote its own multilateral and economic influence, and strengthen its military while viewing the U.S. as its main strategic competitor. . . . Selective cooperation among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, driven by the common goal of balancing U.S. efforts and actions and supporting their own strategies, is bolstering the threat that each of them poses to the U.S. . . . The PLA probably is making steady but uneven progress on capabilities that it would use in any attempt to seize Taiwan and deter — and, if necessary, defeat — U.S. military intervention. At times, it has increased the scope, size, and pace of operations around Taiwan.”
- In June, OpenAI declared in a report, “two clusters of ChatGPT accounts likely originating from China that we banned after they used our models in support of apparent covert influence operations that promoted narratives in an attempt to manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and wider tech policies. . . . The targeting of OpenAI and US data center buildouts is significant not because the operation appears to have shifted public opinion, but because it shows PRC-origin influence operators testing narratives against AI infrastructure.”
- In February, the S. government presented “seismic data to buttress its recent allegation that China has secretly carried out low-yield nuclear tests, challenging Beijing’s insistence that it has scrupulously observed an international accord banning all nuclear detonations.”
- The Chinese tech giant Huawei is facing twelve felony charges, ranging from sanctions violations and criminal racketeering to money laundering and fraud, in a New York City courtroom. Department of Justice prosecutor Taylor Stout argued in court that at Huawei, “crime was an important business strategy.”
- The Chinese government continues arbitrary or wrongful detention of American academics on baseless charges, “including Dr. Youlin Chen and American scholar Min Zin.”
On just about every conceivable front — arming and assisting U.S. adversaries, espionage, hacking and cyberwarfare, stealing intellectual property, smuggling oil, nuclear testing, detaining American citizens — the regime of the People’s Republic of China headed by Xi Jinping acts against American interests. These regime acts are not innocent misunderstandings or miscommunications. This is a ruthless totalitarian autocratic regime that wants a not-too-distant future where they are universally hailed as the ascending global power and the U.S. is pitied and mocked as a rapidly declining former great power — and, with de facto lackey regimes in Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang, calls the shots on the global stage.
This does not mean the People’s Republic of China is an unstoppable force; as Thérèse Shaheen reminds us, China “remains a mostly poor, mostly uneducated, aging society riven with internal inconsistencies. Only a sliver of its population is involved in the tech sectors that have the world so mesmerized.” But, as she concludes after her detailed assessment of the Chinese economy, the Chinese Communist Party “has proven time and again, through repression and terror — Tiananmen, Hong Kong, Covid lockdowns, the horrors of the 40 million who died during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution — that it will take any measure, however extreme, to stay in power.”
But we ought to see Xi and the PRC clearly for what they are. This means not claiming, in defiance of a mountain of evidence, that the U.S. and China have “never gotten along better.”
Apparently, the president believes we’re getting along so well, he asked Xi if he wanted to buy any American weapons systems.
U.S. ambassador to China David Perdue, appearing on Fox News Sunday: “President Trump continues to say, hey, we sell arms to other people around the world. He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some at one point?”
ADDENDA: My chat with Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, and his state’s status as a potential site for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses (not “lifestyle”!) was featured in the Tulsa World.
. . . The Morning Jolt, September 17: “No, RFK Jr. Didn’t Make Your Food Unsafe.”
When it comes to bacterial contamination of food — which is more common and includes E. coli, listeria, and salmonella — the overall trend points to outbreaks in which fewer people are falling ill. That’s a promising sign, some food safety leaders say, although the CDC says an estimated 48 million people each year in the U.S. experience foodborne illness.
“That’s an indication we’re finding more outbreaks and finding more when they are smaller and limiting the extent to which they can get bigger,” said Craig Hedberg, a public health professor at the University of Minnesota and leader in food safety surveillance.