“Seven Things You Can’t Say about China” with Senator Tom Cotton

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The Chinese Communist Party’s economic warfare has granted it tremendous influence in American society, industry, and even government. Never was this more apparent than during the COVID-19 pandemic, when those who questioned the CCP’s conduct around the virus—and potential role in creating it—faced accusations of hysteria, xenophobia, and fearmongering.

Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) was one such voice. In his new book Seven Things You Can’t Say about China, he examines how the CCP threatens Americans—from its unprecedented military buildup to its role in the fentanyl trade—and how China uses its influence in media, academia, Wall Street, and Washington to silence critics.

Senator Cotton will join Hudson President and CEO John Walters to discuss the senator’s new book and why Communist China is America’s most dangerous enemy.

Episode Transcript

This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.

John Walters:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I’m John Walters, president and CEO of Hudson Institute. I’m pleased to have you with us, everybody who’s here, everybody who’s joining us virtually. There are copies of Senator Cotton’s book available and they’re free. So we’re not the government, but we can help educate and promote a better understanding of our threats. Hudson was founded by Herman Kahn, who famously wrote the book Thinking About The Unthinkable. Senator Cotton is here with us to speak the unspeakable with his important new book, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China. We have the book and the things up so that people will hopefully remember them. As most of you know, Senator Cotton is a patriot, a major national leader. Hudson honored him for his service to our country in 2023. He represents the people of Arkansas and he’s now chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and part of the Gang of Eight, the eight members of Congress who are most briefed on the highest level intelligence and the security matters of the United States.

He’s also a member of the Senate leadership as chairman of the Senate Republican Conference. As many of you know, he left law practice because of the September 11th attacks and joined the United States Army as an infantry officer. He served five years including two combat tours, and he served with the Old Guard in Arlington National Cemetery, which produced another book which I highly recommend that he wrote. His military decorations include the Bronze Star Combat Infantry Badge and Ranger Tab. He’s a longtime friend of Hudson. And I’m proud to say I have known Senator Cotton for over 10 years. We are grateful that he is here and want to say welcome Senator Cotton.

Senator Cotton:

Thank you, John.

John Walters:

I want to start with your title: Seven Things You Can’t Say About China. Why can’t we say these things? Is this something that Chinese communists have done to us or have we’ve done this to ourselves?

Senator Cotton:

Yes. First off, John, thank you. And Hudson, thank you for hosting me again. Thank you all for being here. I’m sorry I was running momentarily behind. We had votes in the Senate. But I’m glad to be here with you to discuss tonight the Seven Things You Can’t Say About China and the threat that China poses to our nation. It’s not an abstract threat, it’s not a remote threat. It is a threat here today to our way of life, to you and to your family. Most public opinion polls show that Americans have a justly low opinion of communist China. But in my experience, and based on what I’ve learned through more than 10 years in the Senate on the Armed Services Committee, on the Intelligence Committee, and now chairing the committee, is that however bad do you think Chinese communists are, however much of a danger you believe they are to our nation, it’s actually worse than that.

So this book is designed to ring an alarm bell about the threat we face. And I intentionally made it a small easy book to read so you can pick it up and read it on a flight or a couple nighttimes in bed or maybe on the subway back and forth over a couple of days at work. So you can be informed about the threat China poses to us and these seven things that you can’t say about China. Because so many times in our society if you try to criticize communist China, it’s not just Chinese communists, it’s American political opponents as well.

I start the book with an episode from about five years ago, five years ago last week I think, when I first said, “This coronavirus that’s causing a global pandemic may have come from a lab in Wuhan.” They studied bat-based corona viruses there. They’re notoriously sloppy in their safety practices. The lady that runs the lab is literally nicknamed the Bat Lady. Wuhan does not have indigenous bats. The food market there didn’t apparently have bats either. Maybe we should take a look at this lab. And again, I think most people would not be surprised that the Chinese Embassy or Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs came down me like a ton of bricks, as I detail in the book. So did The Washington Post and The New York Times and CNN and others. And I think there’s a lot of reasons for that. Some of it’s probably political correctness or political ideology. But as I describe in the book, China has amassed tremendous influence and power in our society, in part because of the economic wealth and power we’ve helped them build up.

The third thing you can’t say about China that China’s waging in economic world war. They have been for decades. We just finally joined it about eight years ago. But we helped build up in one of the great strategic mistakes in American history, our foremost competitor. It’s obvious at the end of the Cold War with communist Russia passing from the scene, that communist China was the one country that had the potential to become a true competitor to the United States. And we built them up economically. That didn’t just pay for the military that they’re building up since they’re preparing for war, as I say in chapter two. But it also gave them tremendous influence in this country because so many people have gotten rich off of China. So many people and so many businesses are still deeply invested in China. And China has an incredible amount of leverage over them.

So one example I use is Hollywood. When was the last time you saw a movie with a Chinese villain? And the answer is it’s been a very long time, at least since 1997 with Seven Years in Tibet and Brad Pitt. Which again, China came down on like a ton of bricks, on him, on the other actors, on the studio. And Hollywood movie executives got the picture very quickly that if you had a movie that put China in an unflattering light or told the story of something like Tibet and the Dalai Lama or today the Uyghur genocide or the crackdown in Hong Kong, you would lose your access to the very large and lucrative Chinese movie market. So the most popular American cultural art form, movies, never disparaged China.

And I also point out in the book that every major news network in America, except Fox News now, is owned by or affiliated with one of those Hollywood movie studios. Do you really think it’s a coincidence that Fox has the most critical reporting on China as opposed to, say, ABC, which is owned by Disney, which released a movie a couple of years ago where they actually thank some of the government authorities in Xinjiang province that are partly responsible for the genocide against the Uyghur people. Or NBC and MSNBC with Comcast Universal, CNN with Warner Brothers, CBS with Paramount.

And you can just trace that throughout our society, throughout corporate America and Wall Street. There’s a hotel not far up the street, luxury hotel across the street from the White House. And the week that President Trump is trying to conclude the so-called phase one trade deal with China, the chief negotiator summoned a lot of Wall Street execs to that hotel and asked them to lobby the White House, to lobby their contacts there, to lobby the president to make the deal on more favorable terms. Again, and you can see everywhere, I write about how China targets our governments. Again, they don’t just target government here. It’s not just spies running out of the embassy in old-fashioned Cold War style. They are trying to cultivate state and local officials. Well, how are they doing that? Well, one, it can provide them some immediate economic benefits in a concrete sense, tax breaks, subsidies, land grants, what have you. But two, it can also provide de facto lobbyists, state and local officials who are chasing after Chinese money and job announcements, might tell their congressman, their senator, “Can you tone it down a little bit?”

Not about the factory we’re trying to get in our hometown, but tone it down a little bit about Hong Kong. Because they’re being encouraged to do so. I mean, it is true of pandas at your zoo. You don’t get a panda at your zoo with no strings attached to it. There’s always a string attached to it with communist China, and that’s one reason why there are so many voices in America that are silenced or at least sometimes censor themselves about communist China.

John Walters:

You talk about this happening to you with regard to Arkansas and the Chinese dangling investments in Arkansas to get the governor to approach.

Senator Cotton:

Yeah, there’s supposedly a big paper mill. It was going to be open in South Arkansas. I was always pretty skeptical of it. It started under Democratic governor, it went to a Republican governor. He encouraged me on several occasions to meet with officials from the Chinese consulate in Houston. I politely deflected a couple times. Finally, I just said flatly like, “Look, when I’m in Arkansas, when we’re not in session, on the weekends and the recesses and I’m in Arkansas, I spend my time meeting with Arkansans, not with Chinese communists. If they want to meet with me, they’ve got an embassy right up the street and they can come in and meet with me and I’m willing to do that.” And he said, “Well, the consulate in Houston is what manages Chinese investment in Arkansas.” At which point I was like, “Absolutely not I’m going to meet with them.” Because that was clearly an effort to try to influence me and my views on China by having dangled this big super project out for years and years and years. I was always confident that it would probably come a cropper, as it did.

And then some short time after that, President Trump in 2020 closed the Chinese consulate in Houston. And if you recall, there was billowing plumes of black smoke for hours on end as they did burn something. I’m sure that was more than just the trash, because Secretary of State Pompeo referred to that consulate as a den of spies, and that’s exactly what it was.

John Walters:

I want to ask you about the structure of the things you can’t say, whether there’s a central truth that requiring everyone else to lie protects. Do the lies protect a central truth or is there some other structure, because you’ve thought about these things more detail, I guess, is there a profound and deeper truth that we have to be worried about?

Senator Cotton:

Well, the first thing I say you can’t say about China, it’s not often said, is that China is an evil empire. And I know that gives some peoples the vapors and sends them to the fainting couch. That’s an obvious reference to Ronald Reagan calling communist Russia an evil empire in 1983, which also gave people the vapors and sent them to the fainting couch, especially here in Washington. But I think it’s vital that you understand the nature of a regime if you want to understand what makes it tick, why it does what it does, why it poses a threat or might be an ally, whether you can get it to change or to not change. And I lay out in great detail in the first chapter that it’s still communist China. Xi Jinping is a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thinker. He wants to replace, he wants the next generation of leaders to be referred to as Marxist-Leninist-Xiist, I guess. But there is no doubt that China has never changed its spots.

And you can see this in the rhetoric of its leaders. Yeah, they do things like say, “Hide your strength and bide your time,” as Deng Xiaoping did. But remember what the point of that is. It’s to allow China to grow rich and therefore to go strong. They talk about using market-based tools for socialist ends. I mean, they’re much better at managing a modern economy than Soviet Russia ever was. In part because we have taught them how to do so with our professional class. And European professional classes have taught them how to do so. But they are still at root Marxist-Leninists, and that’s why, for instance, they’re committing a genocide against the Uyghur people. That’s why they committed one that still goes on to this day against Tibetans. Massive territories in their hinterlands that provides all kinds of strategic depth in other assets that they will not allow a small religious and ethnic minority to control. That’s why they persecute Christians. Many people are surprised to know that China is one of the largest Christian nations in the world, by some measures up to 100 million Christians. And you either have to register with the state that monitors you, like they monitor everyone, or you take the risk if you’re not registered, of having your small private church demolished, of being arrested, of being tortured, of being disappeared. The Falun Gong was a harmless spiritual movement based in Buddhism. You’re probably familiar with them mostly doing yoga and breathing exercises on the mall or in a public park near you. One small, tiny protest in the late 1990s led to a massive and vicious violent crackdown on them, because Chinese communists were terrified that any kind of entity organization, association, had grown outside of the Chinese Communist Party. And to this day, they’re still oppressed. China broke its promises naturally, which is what it does, to the United Kingdom about Hong Kong. Supposed to have 50 years of autonomy and freedom in Hong Kong. Got less than half of that by 2020. And they’d been trying to do it since almost the handover in 1997.

Brave Hong Kongers had protested enough to make the cost too high, but under the cover of the coronavirus, they did. And then I move on in the second chapter to talk about the bloody history of Chinese aggression. Miles Yu, your friend, has said that no country on earth has invaded or attacked its neighbors more often than communist China has, which is absolutely true. Absolutely true going back to 1949. There’s barely a country on its periphery that has not been attacked or affronted by Communist China. So I think it’s very important that you understand what the nature of regime, is if you try to understand what it does to its own people. Most importantly for us here in America, what it aspires to do to America and to an American-led world order.

John Walters:

Yeah, it’s actually shocking. Because some of this, I, of course knew from the work of my research team here at Hudson and reading and being attention to this. But when you go through it in detail in a systematic way, it’s also shocking that it’s not on our mind. It’s not on our mind when we think about the threat from China. It’s not on our mind when we think about their danger.

Senator Cotton:

And I’ll confess. As I was working on the book a year ago when I was working on that first chapter, it just reminded us like, “Man, they are really evil.” I work on this stuff all the time in Congress, but oftentimes, when you’re in Congress and you’re doing the day-to-day things, you’re worried about this provocation against Taiwan or this demand on the trade front or what have you need to step back and again and think of why it is they do what they do. And it is a evil to totalitarian regime. And I write in there that it’s a techno-totalitarian regime. It’s probably more so than any country has ever been. Certainly, more control over its own people than communist Russia ever had. Maybe more than Orwell could have imagined. He said that, “Tyranny was a boot stomping on the human face forever.” I think in communist China, you might amend or add to that a smartphone app monitoring the human face forever.

John Walters:

One of the other things that you go through systematically is the infiltration of America, for those of us old enough like me to remember the Cold War and Soviet subversion. It never reached these levels. The level that you talk about with regard to the government, with our society, with our children. Can you say a little bit about that? People haven’t-

Senator Cotton:

We talked about that a little bit earlier, and the reason it never got to that level with communist Russia is we didn’t have the degree of economic entanglement. Our two blocs were largely separate. There was some trade here and there. But nothing like what we have with China. And therefore, as I said, you have many, many people and many companies that are dependent upon China, over which China has tremendous leverage. And China uses that leverage. Another example I write about in the book is professional sports. In the case of the NBA in particular, one of the most popular sports in China, and its biggest overseas market. If you remember about five or six years ago, the general manager of the Houston Rockets merely posted an image saying, “You should stand with Hong Kongers fighting for their freedom.” And China came down like a ton of bricks again.

It took all the merchandise out of their stores. It took down NBA streaming on their services. LeBron James and Steve Kerr, Hall of Fame player and coach, who are very prominent and outspoken when it comes to social justice warriors, criticized the general manager for saying that. Basically, saying that he should have thought about how much money it could cost the NBA and other players. The CEO of the Brooklyn Nets also expressed solidarity. And surprisingly enough, he was out of his job just couple months later. Owned by Joe Tsai, one of the co-founders of Alibaba and a well-known Chinese communist apologist. Thinking about Enes Kanter Freedom who first came to fame, aside from his basketball ability, for standing up for the plight of Turks in his native Turkey. But then later began to stand up for Hong Kongers and Uyghurs and so forth, by wearing symbols or words on his shoes.

Pretty soon, he was cut from his team and he thinks, and I agree, blacklisted from the NBA. So it’s just again, an example of the kind of power and influence that the way we’ve helped communist China grow wealthy, has reverberated back into our country, in a way that you never had with Soviet Russia. Sure, they ran spies out in their embassy all the time, and they underwrote in various ways like the nuclear freeze movement in the first Reagan administration. And China does that too. Don’t get me wrong. China’s still running spies all over Washington and out of its consulates and stuff. But on the scale of something like we’ve never seen because of the economic ties. It doesn’t just have spies in Washington as consulates. They’re in major companies, they’re on our university campuses, they’re in our national labs. In addition to all the indirect influence it has throughout our society.

John Walters:

Can you say a little bit more about the targeting of children?

Senator Cotton:

Sure. One example of that is TikTok. And TikTok is a communist spy app. I understand there’s lots of people that use it. Some of you may use it. I would recommend you don’t, but I understand that some of you do. Plenty of our candidates do as well. And I hear the voices that say, “Well, it’s just another social media app. And is it Facebook and X and Snapchat? They’re all bad too, right?” And sure they have their issues. The difference is that TikTok is under the thumb of communist China. It has to answer through its parent company, ByteDance, to communist China. So your data privacy is at risk. I get it. People say, “Well, they’re just kids. Who cares about their data privacy?” Well, there are a lot of adults on TikTok as well. But those kids pretty quickly become adults themselves, and they go into fields like law enforcement and the military and intelligence and sensitive industrial posts. And that data is forever. It can be sensitive and it can be used to blackmail or get leverage over a person.

I also hear people say, “Well, it’s just ... The content is harmless.” So I agree. There’s plenty of harmless content on TikTok is on other social media apps, cat videos or how-to videos about cooking or home repair or fantasy football, or what have you. But there’s a lot of harmful content as well. Go look at the evidence that had been produced by state attorneys, general, of both parties and their lawsuits against TikTok. You get a new TikTok app, you tell TikTok you’re a teenage girl. You don’t ever watch a single video. You don’t state a single preference. It will start to feed you eventually content about your body image, negative content. It’ll start to feed you content about eating disorders. Tell it you’re a teenage boy. Same thing. Don’t watch any videos. Don’t express any preferences. It’ll start feeding you the most obscene kinds of pornography, the most graphic kinds of violence. For anyone.

It will glamorize drug use. It’ll even glamorize suicide. It’ll even glamorize suicide if you tell TikTok that you are sad or depressive and you want something uplifting. And there are stories in that book about kids who have watched those videos and then killed themselves, to include in [inaudible 00:21:31]. That’s much worse. Much worse by orders of magnitude than anything you can see on any other social media app. And finally, it’s a tool of Chinese communist propaganda as well. Again, go on X, go on Facebook, go on Snapchat. Compare what you can learn there about say, Tiananmen Square or Taiwan or the Uyghurs or Tibet, to what you can learn on TikTok, which is nothing. There are stories about this in the news recently because of the new DeepSeek AI search engine, about ... Type in Tiananmen Square, and it’ll tell you that it can’t say anything about that.

If it’s happening with DeepSeek, of course, it’s happening with TikTok and it’s algorithm. Compare anti-Semitic content. By orders of magnitude, there is more anti-Semitic content or pro-Hamas content on TikTok than there is on any other app. And think about what happened last year when Congress was considering the law that requires ByteDance to divest TikTok if it’s going to continue operating here. They sent push notices to their users, asking them to push this button to contact their member of Congress, and ask us to vote against it. That is not a spontaneous uprising of American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. That is a Chinese communist influence operation. A lot of kids did, and they threatened to kill house members, or they threatened to kill themselves if the bill passed. If they can do it for that, they can do it for the next time Donald Trump wants to impose a higher tariff on China, or the next time there’s a moment of great tension over Taiwan.

So the difference between TikTok and all those other apps is that it’s under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party. That’s just one way I write about how they’re coming for our kids. Another one is what I call the reverse opium war. Many of you probably remember the Opium War from your high school history classes. In the mid 19th century, wars between China and European powers about whether China was going to open up for sale of opium and other disputes about trade. China lost those wars and had to make humiliating concessions. They still refer to it as their century of humiliation, and that’s what they largely date it back to. Well, China’s running a reverse opium war against the United States now, and has been for many years, as if American teenagers today are responsible for what European nations did almost 200 years ago.

It’s not new by the way. During World War II, in the final days of Chinese Civil War, Mao’s party made a substantial part of its revenue running dope as well. So they’ve been doing this for a long time. But for years, China was producing fentanyl, sending it to Mexico, which was smuggling it into our country. One of the few successes we’ve had with China on this front was in President Trump’s first term, they got China to stop making the fentanyl and sending it to Mexico. But what did they do? They immediately started mass-producing in excessive capacity the precursors, the ingredients for fentanyl. And they send those chemicals to Mexico so the cartels can mix the fentanyl themselves. They even send pill presses for them to make the pills. And China sometimes claims that they can’t stop this. They’re not aware of it.

Remember, it’s a techno-totalitarian police state. It knows everything that’s going on within its borders. Of course, they could stop it if they wanted to because they don’t because they view it as a point of leverage and strategic advantage, that tens of thousands of Americans are still dying every year from fentanyl poison. It’s something that takes up the time of the president and the Congress and local officials. Something therefore, that time that we’re not spending on other issues related to China. There’s no doubt that the Chinese Communist Party is one of the number one causes of death for young Americans in this country.

John Walters:

Yeah. I was going to ask you one more question about that, because we’ve talked about this before, and the use of the Mexican cartels by the Chinese Communist government. Mike Gallagher, who’s now distinguished fellow here with us, when he chaired the select committee in the house, their team produced the documentary evidence that showed that on Chinese websites and in Chinese records on those websites, the government was subsidizing the sending of these chemicals. It wasn’t that they couldn’t stop it, we don’t know where it is. They gave them VAT rebates. They allowed them to reduce and ship chemicals that were illegal inside China. On the periphery you might say, “Okay, how far do you want to go?” But when tens of thousands of people are dying, when they’re money laundering on the backside of the other part of this, why isn’t that an act of war? Why don’t we see that as an act of war?

Senator Cotton:

Well, I think it’s something both against China, but also their cartel intermediaries that we should get much tougher on. And I expect the Trump administration will. They started to get much tougher on it in the final year or two of the first term. I expect they will now as well. But again, I mean Mike and that committee is right, and I draw on some of that work in the book. China knows all this. They’re not like the United States where the government doesn’t see into every company and doesn’t have the ability to ascertain what’s going on. They know this. Over half the world’s surveillance cameras are in China, even though China only has about a sixth of the world’s population. Fifth. And they claim that they can identify the face of any Chinese subject in a matter of seconds anywhere in the country.

And they don’t know that these companies... Because again, they’re not like small fly-by-night operations. These are large major concerns that have a lot of other legitimate... And fentanyl has legitimate purposes for pain management under the care of a licensed doctor. So do all these ingredients. So do all the other chemicals they make. They know as the House Committee demonstrated what these companies are up to and they are supporting it through the vast array of techniques that I write about in chapter three about how they’re waging economic world war through subsidies, through tax rebates, through other kinds of state support for these companies. They know exactly what’s happening.

John Walters:

I’ll have you make some comments about the final of the seven things, and that is that China can win. I mean, if anything, that may be the most frightening. The other things are terrible, you could push back, that this is not just a low-grade conflict or harassment of America. This is an intentional effort to win in the struggle to control the world between freedom and tyranny.

Senator Cotton:

Well, of course, China could win, just like Russia could have won in the Cold War. I mean, it’s easy to look back historically and think that something was foreordained, but nothing is foreordained. I don’t believe, and I know you don’t, most of you don’t in grand historical forces or history with the capital H that are kind of immovable by human choice. Everything in the end comes down to choice with some degree of fortune or luck, good or bad, mixed in, individual choices in each of our lives or collective choices we make in organizations in our country or as a nation as a whole. And it’s a choice whether we won or lost the Cold War. And in 1979, I estimate a lot of people thought we were on the losing side of it. There are serious strategists like Bill Roode in 1979 who thought NATO needed to start preparing for a cantonment strategy, a strategy to rapidly withdraw from its eastern front and establish Norway and Great Britain and Spain as cantonments and lodgements to fight back against a victorious Soviet invasion of the rest of Western Europe.

We collectively decided that we were going to elect Ronald Reagan and we got Pope John Paul II and Great Britain got Margaret Thatcher and a lot of other decisions we made, and that’s what helped us win the Cold War. We could have lost. We can lose to China. If we do, it’ll probably be over Taiwan. I understand a lot of people think, “Why is Taiwan so important? It’s just a tiny little island. It’s so close to them. It’s so far from us. They have some disputed and spurious historical claims to it.” And you could say, “They rolled into Hong Kong, they rolled into Tibet. They’ve done this before and it didn’t cause China to supplant America as the world’s dominant economic military superpower.” But Taiwan’s different and these times are different than what China was in the 1950s, for instance. China is again a near peer in economic power and rapidly closing the gap on military power and by far, the world’s largest military, second most technologically advanced military, and they’re still gaining on us.

Taiwan too is different from those other places. As Douglas MacArthur said at the start of the Korean War, it is the unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender off the coast of mainland China. He also said it would be a disaster of utmost importance if Taiwan fell into the hands of a hostile power. Namely, then as now, Communist China. Geography is the most important part of foreign policy because it’s the part that never changes. Taiwan is still that unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender off the coast of mainland China. It is still the linchpin in the so-called first island chain of Japan and Taiwan and the Philippines and all down that currently acts as something of an obstacle to Communist Chinese ambitions. With Taiwan in hand, it would be a springboard.

It still sits like a cork at the top of the South China Sea, one of the most important waterways for global trade to include... For our global trade. Add to that though, there’s a massive economic dimension to it as well. Taiwan produces more than 60 percent of the world’s semiconductors, more than 90 percent of the world’s advanced semiconductors. So it’s an even greater importance to us and to American power and world peace now than it was when Douglas MacArthur observed those things in 1950. If China went for the jugular in Taiwan, no matter the outcome, it would probably mean an immediate global depression, contraction of global economies by more than 10 percent as the United States and China and our partners largely cut off trade with each other. Stock market crashes, life savings wiped out, mass unemployment in the United States, empty shelves. Semiconductors are in almost everything. The phones in your pocket, televisions, appliances, vehicles, tractors, everything. Manufacturing capacity will almost certainly be destroyed.

And it’s not like oil. If you’re having a war in one place that has a lot of oil, you can ask the other place to pump a lot. This is a highly, highly bespoke manufactured product. We’ve tried to make them here. We haven’t done a great job over the last few years. So that capacity would be destroyed or maybe even worse, if China could seize the island and keep them intact, it would then have the leverage over us and the rest of the world. And if China did succeed... That’s all what would happen regardless of the outcome. But if China did succeed, then you’d see a series of cascading consequences. You’d probably see most countries on China’s periphery begin to distance themselves from the United States and to begin to accommodate Communist China to a much greater degree. Those nations that could would also probably go nuclear, Japan, South Korea, Australia, go around to South Asia, India and Pakistan would expand their nuclear arsenals.

Iran would feel empowered to rush it and break out. Arab nations would do the same. So being able to keep nuclear weapons really limited for the last 80 years, those efforts would totally break down. China would continue with its efforts with greater justification to tell everyone around the world, “America is the weak horse. America is the declining power. We’re the strong horse. We’re the rising power. You should support us. You should be more like us. Don’t go with the flawed American model of market-based democratic capitalism. Go with our model.” And ultimately... This is not a secret. This is what Chinese officials told President Trump’s delegation in 2017. I write about it in the book as does H.R. McMaster in his book, as does Matt Pottinger, they were there, that they will see America is what Henry Kissinger called an island on the edge of the world.

We would be. We’re over here in the new world, we’re by ourselves, something like 4 percent of the world’s population and 6 percent of its land mass, a quarter of its economy now but that would decline pretty quickly. As they told President Trump’s delegation, they see America in the long term as a low-cost commodity provider to China because we have a lot of oil and gas and we have a lot of arable farmland that we can produce at low cost. And if we don’t like that and we don’t dance to their tune, well, they can get their farm products from Latin America and they can get their oil from the Middle East and from Russia. So you’d see a gradual weathering and decline of American power and American prosperity if China were to succeed in an invasion and annexation of Taiwan.

Of course, like I said, given that you’d have a global depression if they start it at all, the only way to win in a conflict over Taiwan is for it to never start in the first place. And that’s why we have to be strong and resolute and we have to help Taiwan get stronger as well to deter that conflict from ever happening in the first place.

John Walters:

This is a book that also could be titled Wake Up. You talk about the things you can’t say, but the impact of this is... The suppression of these thoughts or these truths means that you don’t prepare, that you allow this to continue. And I wondered whether there isn’t a thing that we can’t say about China, which is that we must find a way to undermine, weaken, and change the Chinese communist regime. We don’t want to talk about regime change. We have a history. We have baggage. People are immune. They get very twitchy on stuff like this. But what you have is a dedicated, powerful adversary that is finding every weak spot to go into and weaken the United States and its allies, of course. So I wonder whether the cumulative effect of your Seven Things You Can’t Say About China and Wake Up is, “Look, we need a strategy that really does take on the magnitude of the threat that we face that we have not had in the past.”

Senator Cotton:

Yeah, and like I said, that’s the reason... The main reason I wrote the book is because I wanted to ring the alarm bell and I wanted to kind of grab our fellow Americans by the lapels. I wish I was able to write a book like this 10 or 15 years ago when the magnitude of the threat was not as severe as it is today. And it is very clear that Communist China has studied what happened to Communist Russia in the 1980s until it disintegrated in 1991, and they are very adamant that they’re not going to allow that to happen in Communist China. That’s one reason why a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Peng was behind the crackdown in Tiananmen Square.

They were not going to allow even the slightest hint of the loosened reigns that you saw behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s come to China. That’s one of the reason why they built this techno-totalitarian police state. It’s reasonable for us to be afraid of Communist China. Communist China is afraid of its own people because they are, as I say at the end of the book, the first and the worst victims of the Chinese Communist Party. And they will be as long as there’s communist rule in Beijing.

John Walters:

And you point out they spend more money actually suppressing internal dissent than they do-?

Senator Cotton:

For all the money they’ve spent... A thousand percent increase in their defense spending since the turn of the century. More than a thousand percent. They still spend more money controlling their own people than they do on their military.

John Walters:

I think we have time for a couple minutes of questions. Senator’s kind enough to stay for a few minutes after that and sign books for those of you that would like him to do so. But before I start the questions, I’d like to ask you to join me and congratulate him. There’s just been an embargo...

John Walters:

An embargo release that shows that this book, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China is now become number one on the New York Times bestseller list. So, congratulations. We’ll take a couple of questions so that we can have a microphone somewhere. Right? Okay. Why don’t we start here and here. Okay.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much for coming. I remember in the 1990s, conservatives were having meetings about thinking normalizing trade with China would open up the human rights. I never did figure out why they thought that, and they were obviously wrong. My question is how much of the problems we see now do you think was from making that decision, and should it be reversed, the normalization of trade? And second, there are people, increasingly isolationists actually, who think China is evil and they are waging economic war, so much so that we should only focus on that, and totally ignore other areas of the world like Ukraine, and I was wondering if you could comment on that.

Senator Cotton:

Yeah, so in the first, I think granting China permanent most-favored nation status was one of the worst mistakes we’ve ever made in our history. As I said, broadly helping make China wealthy and building their economy’s the worst, one of the worst strategic mistakes America has ever made, and it was foreseeable as well. I mean you could have decided in the 90... You could have seen in the 1990s, and specifically after the Soviet Union finally broke into its constituent parts, that China was the only country that could pose a genuine threat to us in terms of our way of life and replacing us. The only that could fill the gap that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had posed. Obviously we have threats from Iran, especially if it goes nuclear. We have threats from North Korea because it is nuclear, but that China was going to be the real potential threat.

And a lot of people forget this. Bill Clinton campaigned as a China hawk, to crack down on China in part because of Tenement Square, which happened while President Bush 41 was in office, in part because he said that President Bush was not doing enough to get tough on China’s economic warfare manipulating its currency, subsidizing its companies, giving them tax breaks, or Chinese theft and manipulation of our companies.

As is often the case with China though, and was the case until eight years ago when President Trump was elected, president Clinton flip-flopped after about a year in office. He did not want to give them permanent most-favored nation status, he then said we would. And it took a while, back in those days, we were giving the most-favored nation status one year at a time, and it was always a pitched battle up in Congress. I wasn’t here that far ago-

John Walters:

I was.

Senator Cotton:

... but I’ve talked to people who were here-

John Walters:

I’m older.

Senator Cotton:

... and I... It was a pitched battle, mostly corporate America lined up on one side, and a lot of conservative activists, a lot of religious activists on the other side, and giving them most-favored, permanent most-favored nation status, which is what allowed them to get into the World Trade Organization under President Bush 43’s watch, created what’s known as the China shock. And that’s the supercharging of the loss of not just jobs or factories, but entire companies and industries from America to China, because as soon as they had the permanent status, corporate America knew they could ship all of that to China, and not have to worry about some congressional yahoos, in their mind, revoking it the next year if China committed some atrocity like Tiananmen Square again. So I think it was a grave mistake. I’ve long sponsored legislation to repeal it. I used to sponsor it with now Secretary Rubio when he was in the Senate. I sponsor it now with Senator Hawley and a few others.

To your second question, I don’t think we can neglect any part of the world, because China doesn’t neglect any part of the world. To include our own backyard, as the president has pointed out about Panama. We have Chinese companies supported by the Chinese government operating on both ends of the Panama Canal. Or in the Middle East where you have China building one of its first overseas bases, conveniently enough just down the street from our base in the Horn of Africa. Or propping up the Iranian regime by cheating on sanctions and buying cut-rate Iranian oil. So if we want to confront China, just like we wanted to confront communist Russia, we have to understand that they are challenging and pushing on us and our friends and our interests all around the world.

John Walters:

This young lady here.

Speaker 2:

Senator, good to see you. My question is, you talked about China cultivating US officials about the enormous leverage that the PRC has over Hollywood, over companies that are invested in China, and the danger that that kind of influence poses to American public opinion, to lawmakers even on Capitol Hill. And I’m wondering if you could explain for us why you’re not concerned about the influence of Elon Musk, whose Tesla is obviously deeply engaged in China, who certainly doesn’t say any of these seven things, having the ear of the President of the United States, being present often in the Oval Office, and in cabinet meetings. Are you concerned about that influence, and why or why not?

Senator Cotton:

Yeah, I mean I think it’s unfortunate that Tesla has such large operations in China, just like so much of corporate America. I mean it really is the story of corporate America over the last 30 years. You could add in there Coca-Cola, and Ford, and Caterpillar, and Apple, and any other number of companies as well. I’d like to see all of those companies come back to the United States, or at least to the greatest extent possible get out of China, or at least limit their exposure to China as a sole or limited source provider.

As far as Mr. Musk’s role in advising President Trump, he is the advisor, Donald Trump is the decider, and I’m pretty confident there are plenty of voices that reflect my views on China, to include me advising the president, like Secretary Rubio and like Peter Navarro, and others. But the president does deserve credit for what he did eight years ago, which is actually and finally upend the conventional wisdom on China, going back decades. That if we simply cooperated with China, if we economically integrated with China and help them grow wealthy, they would grow more moderate. They would stop oppressing their own people and committing genocide, and they would stop threatening the United States.

I guess you could maybe think that that theory was sound in the 1990s, but too many politicians in both parties, both parties passed permanent most-favored nation status in the 1990s, believed it for way too long. Even when you had presidents like President Clinton or President Obama who campaigned against their opponents as China hawks, then flip-flopped once they got into office. Donald Trump didn’t do that eight years ago. And he actually changed the conventional wisdom, and what I’d say is largely a bipartisan foreign policy now, the test of a durable foreign policy like you had with Truman in the early days of the Cold War, a policy that Dwight Eisenhower largely carried.

Not to say that we don’t have our disagreements between the parties on this, that, or the other specific matter related to China, or that I agree with every single thing the president has ever done about China. Of course, I don’t agree with every single thing that anyone has ever done, but President Trump deserves credit for actually changing American foreign policy in a durable way on China.

John Walters:

Yeah, I agree with you entirely. It’s an amazing bipartisan change, and in a time when there was a lot of division, but it’s also was a global change. All of a sudden our allies and everybody else came along too and said, “Oh my gosh, you’re right. This is a”-

Senator Cotton:

Yeah, in ways in big and small, and the trade flows, or work that the State Department and the UN delegation did in the first Trump administration, fighting back against China and international organizations, making sure that Chinese communists were not going to be elected to leadership positions in UN agencies and organizations. There was a time, it was that close, imagine that China was going to be the leader of the World Intellectual Property Organization. Imagine that. I mean, it’s like when Cuba or Syria gets on the UN Human Rights Council.

John Walters:

Yeah, it’s amazing. Okay, we’ll take one more question. Ma’am, go ahead. Wait for the microphone so we can all hear you.

Speaker 3:

Hi, Senator Cotton, I’m pleased to meet you. My name is Janet Bates. I live in Alexandria. I just wanted to ask you if we want to defend Taiwan, and I think it’s very important that we do, shouldn’t we also be concentrating heavily on stopping the harassment of the Philippines that goes on? They have to-

Senator Cotton:

Yes, we should. I mean, Philippines is even in some ways a more compelling case. It’s not as consequential as Taiwan, as Eisenhower said, but we are a treaty ally with the Philippines. We are treaty-bound to defend them, to include some of their outlying islands that China harasses, which are now unfortunately within short missile range of Chinese militarized islands that they have built up in the South China Sea. These are places that were just rocky outcroppings with maybe a few shrubs on them 10 or 15 years ago, and now they’re major military post with runways capable of handling the largest bombers.

They’ve got radars, they’ve got air defense and missile defense systems. They’ve got barracks, they’ve got swimming pools on them, all designed to give China control of the South China Sea and to limit the US Navy’s power projection in the South China Sea. And much of that is happening within short range missiles now of the Philippines’ outlying islands, and also its main islands.

And the Philippines have been a good partner in this. They’ve especially been a good partner recently in helping us prepare to deter Taiwan because again, the only way that you can succeed in a conflict over Taiwan is not to fight it in the first place. And we need allies like the Philippines, like Japan, like Australia, to help us deter that conflict from happening in the first place.

John Walters:

Well, I’m going to leave some time for the Senator to sign some books for some of you, but first I want to thank him again for not only being with us here... And for all he has done for us as Americans and for our allies. Thank you.

Senator Cotton:

Thank you, John. Appreciate it.