Try Bipartisanship About China

Phyllis Schlafly

by Phyllis Schlafly, Eagle Forum: We heard a lot of loose talk during the presidential campaign about getting tough with Communist China. Since both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney criticized China’s violations of free-trade rules that the United States obeys, this would be the perfect issue to showcase the bipartisanship to which both men said they are committed.

Free trade with China is a racket because we play by the rules, while China steals our patents and manufacturing secrets, and violates the rules of the World Trade Organization to which they agreed when we helped them join in 2001. The statistics are mind-boggling: the U.S. has closed 57,000 factories, lost 2.8 million manufacturing jobs, and piled up a trade deficit with China of $3 trillion.

A new book by Peter Navarro and Greg Autry titled “Death by China” makes a powerful case against allowing China to continue its war against America while our leaders pretend it’s just good capitalism. Our workers join the unemployment lines, our country’s manufacturing base disappears, CEOs rake in their bonuses for cutting costs through outsourcing, and a big Communist country builds up a tremendous military in order to become the number-one superpower in the 21st century.

The Chinese engage in massive intellectual property theft in order to give them an unjustified leap forward in technology: aerospace, biotech, cyber, information, and energy. The Chinese force U.S. corporations to give China their technology and manufacturing secrets as the price of locating a plant in China.

Our U.S. weapons system is endangered by Chinese cheating. The Senate Armed Services Committee reported that one million suspected “bogus parts” have been found in U.S. military aircraft, including the Air Force’s largest cargo plane, special operations helicopters, and a Navy surveillance plane. This report describes a “flood of counterfeit parts” from China, which threaten our national security and the safety of our troops.

Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative, said that even the smallest counterfeit parts can cause a lot of trouble. The Senate Armed Services Committee reported that a faulty Chinese-made chip in a sensor on a Navy helicopter in the Pacific Fleet prevented the pilot from firing its missiles.

Some counterfeit chips are designed to contain a “kill switch” that can shut down the military equipment. Some chips appear to be working perfectly, but really are sending information to someone else.

Chips are not the only Chinese counterfeits. Thousands of U.S. motorists found their cars were installed with dangerous Chinese counterfeit airbags and now have to be replaced at the owner’s expense. A government test found that some Chinese airbags don’t inflate, and some shoot flames and shards of metal shrapnel instead of inflating.

China manipulates its currency to the disadvantage of American exporters, excludes American products from government purchases, subsidizes Chinese companies to give them a commercial advantage, piggybacks on U.S. technology, and invents regulations and standards designed to keep out foreign competition.

As more and more U.S. public schools are making vaccinations a requirement, Communist China is preparing to take over the vaccine market. China’s food and drug administration brags that China has more than 30 vaccine-producing companies having an annual production capacity of nearly one billion doses.

Are U.S. parents willing to inject their kids with Chinese vaccines? At least 81 U.S. deaths in 2008 were caused by Chinese-made Heparin, a blood thinner widely used in surgery.

This year’s scandal involved a big outbreak of meningitis and reportedly about 32 deaths. We don’t yet know where the contamination came from, but about 80 percent of the active ingredients in U.S. prescriptions are imported from China or India.

An expert on Chinese health at the Council on Foreign Relations, Yanzhong Huang, pointed out the difference between Chinese and U.S. medicine safety. Unlike China, U.S. vaccines are kept safe by supporting institutions such as “the market economy, democracy, media monitoring, civil society, and a business ethics code,” plus inspections and regulations, severe punishments for violators, and lawsuits by trial lawyers.

All during the ’70s and ’80s, and even the ’90s, the globalists predicted that as China pursued a market economy, China would evolve into economic freedom, then political freedom, and become a good fellow in the world community. Dream on; it didn’t happen.

China is a dictatorship run by the Communist Party determined to use every protectionist gimmick to become the world’s number-one military and economic superpower. When will Americans wake up to how U.S. adherence to “free trade” allows China to cheat us coming and going?

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