Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe appeared on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures show, and he brought quite a list of particulars about the aggression of Red China against the whole world, most recently by unleashing the coronavirus which has caused the deaths of over a million and crushed the global economy.
Here’s some of the transcript:
JOHN RATCLIFFE: Well Maria, you talked about the op-ed earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal. It really was more of an intelligence piece; it was an intelligence briefing to the American people about our greatest national security threat, China, how they’re threatening us economically, militarily, technologically, and you just highlighted one of the ways that shows how China is a threat and that’s this Covid-19 pandemic that the Chinese communist party — when they knew about its transmissibility — allowed it to go from China to the rest of the world.
They intentionally and deliberately downplayed it in their country, pressured world health organizations and allowed it to spread to the rest of the world, and that didn’t just have the effect of wrecking the global economy. It didn’t just have the effect of killing millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of Americans. It also had grave political consequences.
Here, in the United States, the pandemic influenced a lot about how people voted, but also how they had to vote. As a result of the pandemic, we saw state legislatures as little as 90 days before the election adopting new voting procedures. Essentially we had universal mail-in balloting across this country in a way that we hadn’t seen before, and to that point, almost 73 percent of the American people this year voted before election day, a good percentage of those, by mail. That’s about an 80 percent increase over anything we’ve ever seen before, so it’s little wonder that we see what’s happening around the country as a result of that, with mail-in balloting and all of the questions and the questions that are being raised in lawsuits and by everyday Americans about what happened in the election.
DNI Ratcliffe was appearing because of his December 3 Wall Street Journal article that apparently got a lot of attention, as it should have. Titled “China Is National Security Threat No. 1,” the piece laid out an alarming list of the specific ways in which Beijing is working to dominate the world and destroy any opposition.
President Trump has seen the threat that Red China presents and has responded accordingly, unlike his predecessors in the White House. The statement of DNI Ratcliffe represents the strategy of the president, who is busy with defending his election.
Below is the WSJ article, which shows the real threat against America is from China — not Russia as some argue.
Furthermore, it makes no sense to admit any Chinese nationals as immigrants or students for the foreseeable future.
John Ratcliffe: China Is National Security Threat No. 1, Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2020
Resisting Beijing’s attempt to reshape and dominate the world is the challenge of our generation.
As Director of National Intelligence, I am entrusted with access to more intelligence than any member of the U.S. government other than the president. I oversee the intelligence agencies, and my office produces the President’s Daily Brief detailing the threats facing the country. If I could communicate one thing to the American people from this unique vantage point, it is that the People’s Republic of China poses the greatest threat to America today, and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II.
The intelligence is clear: Beijing intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically. Many of China’s major public initiatives and prominent companies offer only a layer of camouflage to the activities of the Chinese Communist Party.
I call its approach of economic espionage “rob, replicate and replace.” China robs U.S. companies of their intellectual property, replicates the technology, and then replaces the U.S. firms in the global marketplace.
Take Sinovel. In 2018 a federal jury found the Chinese wind-turbine manufacturer guilty of stealing trade secrets from American Superconductor. Penalties were imposed but the damage was done. The theft resulted in the U.S. company losing more than $1 billion in shareholder value and cutting 700 jobs. Today Sinovel sells wind turbines world-wide as if it built a legitimate business through ingenuity and hard work rather than theft.
The FBI frequently arrests Chinese nationals for stealing research-and-development secrets. Until the head of Harvard’s Chemistry Department was arrested earlier this year, China was allegedly paying him $50,000 a month as part of a plan to attract top scientists and reward them for stealing information. The professor has pleaded not guilty to making false statements to U.S. authorities. Three scientists were ousted in 2019 from MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston over concerns about China’s theft of cancer research. The U.S. government estimates that China’s intellectual-property theft costs America as much as $500 billion a year, or between $4,000 and $6,000 per U.S. household.
China also steals sensitive U.S. defense technology to fuel President Xi Jinping’s aggressive plan to make China the world’s foremost military power. U.S. intelligence shows that China has even conducted human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities. There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power.
China is also developing world-class capabilities in emerging technologies. Its intelligence services use their access to tech firms such as Huawei to enable malicious activities, including the introduction of vulnerabilities into software and equipment. Huawei and other Chinese firms deny this, but China’s efforts to dominate 5G telecommunications will only increase Beijing’s opportunities to collect intelligence, disrupt communications and threaten user privacy world-wide. I have personally told U.S. allies that using such Chinese-owned technology will severely limit America’s ability to share vital intelligence with them.
China already suppresses U.S. web content that threatens the Communist Party’s ideological control, and it is developing offensive cyber capabilities against the U.S. homeland. This year China engaged in a massive influence campaign that included targeting several dozen members of Congress and congressional aides.
Consider this scenario: A Chinese-owned manufacturing facility in the U.S. employs several thousand Americans. One day, the plant’s union leader is approached by a representative of the Chinese firm. The businessman explains that the local congresswoman is taking a hard-line position on legislation that runs counter to Beijing’s interests—even though it has nothing to do with the industry the company is involved in—and says the union leader must urge her to shift positions or the plant and all its jobs will soon be gone.
The union leader contacts his congresswoman and indicates that his members won’t support her re-election without a change in position. He tells himself he’s protecting his members, but in that moment he’s doing China’s bidding, and the congresswoman is being influenced by China, whether she realizes it or not.
Our intelligence shows that Beijing regularly directs this type of influence operation in the U.S. I briefed the House and Senate Intelligence committees that China is targeting members of Congress with six times the frequency of Russia and 12 times the frequency of Iran.
To address these threats and more, I have shifted resources inside the $85 billion annual intelligence budget to increase the focus on China. This shift must continue to ensure U.S. intelligence has the resources it needs to give policy makers unvarnished insights into China’s intentions and activities. (Continues)
