Seven Things You Can’t Say About China

Sen. Tom Cotton’s new book, “Seven Things You Can’t Say About China,” asks the reader to give renewed focus on perhaps America’s greatest nemesis—the People’s Republic of China. In seven chapters, Cotton outlines the nature and severity of the threat—and it’s a warning that is sorely needed.

While many Americans pay attention to a few high-profile events involving China—such as when it sent a spy balloon that crossed over our entire country before being shot down by a military aircraft off the coast of South Carolina—we often lose our focus, and China’s predations continue practically unchallenged.

Even recent reports that the balloon was equipped with U.S.-made technology, neither the media nor the American public has given it much attention.

Cotton’s new book asks America to wake up and face some uncomfortable truths about China.

First and foremost, China is an evil totalitarian empire. Although it is committed to the exploitation and victimization of its native population, it is just as determined to expand its dominance globally.

Consider the Chinese Communist Party’s misrule of the native Chinese population.

The mistreatment of the native Chinese population should allow great insights into the threat we face internationally. On the China mainland, the People’s Republic of China cruelly and brutally oppresses the Chinese population.  

Some remember the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, but few realize that China’s predations against its native population have continued up to the present. With a population of more than 1 billion people, it should come as no surprise that its abusive rule is unpopular.

As America’s founders realized in seeking independence in 1776, freedom is the natural state of people. China understands this and to counter it, Cotton argues, the Chinese government “spends as much money on controlling its own people as it does on its military.”

But it isn’t satisfied to merely monitor them—the Chinese Communist Party uses its police powers in ways that can shock the conscience. For instance, China leads the world in macabre ways—according to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, more living Chinese are killed as part of forced organ donations than anywhere in the world.  

China also executes more dissenters than Iran, North Korea, and Syria combined.  

Cotton asserts that the Chinese Communist Party’s laws are “intentionally vague to chill dissent and turn everyone into a criminal-in-waiting. And with a conviction rate over 99.9%, punishment isn’t in doubt.”

The Communist Party does not tolerate dissent. Setting aside political disputes, even something as seemingly benign as religious expression can lead to prison or death. Take its systematic mistreatment of Uyghurs. The Chinese government has pursued multiple discriminatory repressive campaigns in the Uyghur region, including labor camps. According to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, there are at least 135 detention facilities in the Uyghur region that have on-site work camps.  

Cotton reveals the comprehensive attempts that China uses to control and repress native Chinese in a way that should alarm Americans. Spies and technology are deployed on the mainland that despots from earlier generations could only envy.

But China also has global ambitions. China’s military spending has been geometric in its growth. Averaging in the 21st century more than 5% increases a year leads one scholarly organization—the University of Texas’ National Security Review organization—to suggest that it is spending nearly half a trillion dollars in 2024. And in 2023, Bloomberg reported our Pentagon leaders’ assessment that the number may have already exceeded $700 billion. Whichever number is real, China’s military prowess is expanding.

In “Seven Things You Can’t Say About China,” you’ll see that “China has undertaken the largest peacetime military buildup in history.” Cotton argues that this buildup isn’t about peace. He spells it out: “China is preparing for war.”

The country’s “four-million-man military is the largest in the world, around twice the size of our military and nearly as technologically advanced,” Cotton reveals.

If that isn’t alarming enough, the senator dedicates a section to China’s “breathtaking” nuclear arsenal. Today, China has more than 500 warheads, and “by the end of this decade, China plans to double it again to more than 1000 warheads,” Cotton explains.

But before China undertakes a global conflagration, the Chinese Communist Party has other tricks up its sleeve. China has pursued an economic assault on the West, and the U.S. in particular.

This scheme has been wildly successful. 

Cotton reveals that China’s economy has grown more than 1200% since 2001—“the spoils of perhaps the most successful and one-sided economic contest in history.”

In addition to this economic assault, the Chinese government has pushed to directly undermine the American way of life. In two chapters, “China has infiltrated Our Society” and “China Has Infiltrated our Government,” Cotton uses the example of TikTok, the China’s wildly successful social media giant, ostensibly owned by ByteDance. Used by over 170 million Americans and over a billion people globally, TikTok collects sensitive user data accessible to ByteDance and, by extension, the Chinese Communist Party.

Due to the app, the Chinese government has unfettered access to millions of Americans—most of them young—at any given moment and is able to disseminate information that can shape public opinion.

Cotton reports that once America got wise to TikTok and discussed passing a  bill requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok to a non-Chinese owner or else be banned from the U.S. market, the company started spreading money around like candy among Washington, D.C., lobbyists. 

When that didn’t work, ByteDance went to the U.S. Supreme Court to claim that the First Amendment protected its rights to operate in the U.S. unimpeded. Fortunately, TikTok lost—unanimously.

Ultimately, Cotton says that the outcome of this generational threat from China is in our hands. In the chapter “China Could Win,” Cotton quotes Ronald Reagan’s 1964 “Rendezvous With Destiny” speech.  Cotton says this remains the choice that we have.

He’s right that China’s threat should be highlighted more by the media but is also right that it should be addressed by other parts of society. Our churches, neighborhood organizations, and volunteer organizations should take the lead to ensure our country remains vigilant.

Cotton has rightly sounded the alarm.

He eloquently argues that “the dangers have gathered, and the hour has grown late, but we can still prevail if we understand the stakes and the threat.”

Do a favor for the next generation: Read and circulate this book.

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