Trumping China – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Tuesday saw a good deal of clarity emerging with respect to President Trump’s trade strategy.

Trump announced a 90-day pause on the imposition of reciprocal tariffs with those countries who took the advice of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and did not retaliate after the first round of levies were published.

And at the same time, he further escalated the burgeoning conflict with China.

Scott Bessent and I sat with the President while he wrote one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency. The world is ready to work with President Trump to fix global trade, and China has chosen the opposite direction. pic.twitter.com/wNvg8NBnSR

— Howard Lutnick (@howardlutnick) April 9, 2025

Bessent went in front of the cameras to confirm this was the plan from the start:

Treasury Sec. Bessent: “This was the president’s strategy all along. You might even say that he goaded China into a bad position. They have shown themselves to the world to be the bad actors.” pic.twitter.com/FRjSiRpHNU

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) April 9, 2025

We’re now drawing a very clear picture for the world to observe: the United States, which depending on how it’s measured is somewhere between 34 and 39 percent of the world’s consumer market despite having less than 5 percent of its population, is no longer interested in being the dumping ground for the rest of the planet’s goods.

It’s generally thought to be a good thing to be a robust consumer market. But running a $300 billion annual trade deficit with China is a fool’s game.

Why?

• Almost none of the intellectual property behind the goods China sells us is Chinese. In fact, most of the designs involved are American, either because China serves as the manufacturer of merchandise for American sellers or because Chinese sellers have copied and/or stolen our IP.

• While there are occasional exceptions, generally speaking the only advantage Chinese manufacturing offers against American or European competitors is with respect to price. Chinese goods are generally of either generic or even low quality, meaning that it would be simply a matter of time and a little money to relocate much of the supply chain to other countries.

• The $300 billion in trade surplus that China rakes from the United States is plowed into military spending that is clearly aimed at replacing the United States as the world’s preeminent military power. And while we have certainly made mistakes in enforcing Pax Americana, no country in world history has been a greater force for peace, justice, and liberty than has the US of A. It should be seen as a threat not just to us but to the entire world that China has, for example, built the world’s largest surface navy while the Chinese rattle their sabers at Taiwan.

• China is conducting a 21st-century Opium War against America’s youth, dumping the world’s deadliest drug, or more specifically, fentanyl’s precursor ingredients, just next door to us in Mexico and Canada so that Chinese and Mexican criminal gangs can finish its manufacture and ship it across our porous border. Well more than 100,000 Americans die each year as a result, a disproportionate number of those deaths coming, in a cruel irony, in communities already hollowed out by the loss of manufacturing to China.

• We are paradoxically the chief defenders of human liberty on the planet while busily enriching a nation that employs what most of us would term slave labor in order to stock retailers like Walmart and Target; included in that sad spectacle is the subjugation of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province, who are made into slave laborers while the Chinese Communist Party does what it can to scrub away their cultural identity and very ethnicity.

• Our stupid and corrupt political leaders assumed, or at least pretended to assume, that granting China Most Favored Nation trade status would soon lead to China adopting Jeffersonian democracy in our time. In fact, what has happened is China has taken on a grossly disproportionate influence within American culture, politics, academia, and media. Some of this has been overt — like, for example, the Confucius Institutes set up at universities around the country. More of it has been insidious.

• China has for several decades engaged in the largest and most pervasive program of industrial espionage in world history, with America the chief target. It’s widely understood that Chinese students are sent to study at American universities and to engage in research projects as a means of spying, and yet we allow some 280,000 Chinese to study here against only a few hundred Americans in that country for academic pursuits.

And then there is that other thing.

What other thing? COVID, obviously.

We’ve never imposed a reckoning on China for unleashing the most destructive biological weapon (not just in lives but in property and economic activity lost) in the history of the world.

In fact, our failed ruling class engaged in an aggressive cover-up of China’s actions. A new revelation with respect to an old story makes this clear:

Seven Americans may have contracted COVID-19 in Wuhan in October 2019, several months before the reported start of the pandemic, according to a bombshell military report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon that the Biden administration concealed from the public.

The December 2022 report, which the Biden administration was required by law to release to the public over two years ago but didn’t, reveals for the first time that seven U.S. military service members contracted COVID-19-like symptoms during or after their participation in the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019—contradicting the Biden administration’s public claims in 2021 that there was no evidence that any American participants contracted the virus at those games. The revelation adds to a mounting body of evidence that the virus was circulating in Wuhan for months before China disclosed it to the world in December 2019 and further bolsters the growing consensus that it could have leaked into the human population from a Chinese lab.

The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act required the Biden administration to make its report on the 2019 Wuhan World Military Games “publicly available on an internet website in a searchable format” by the summer of 2022. Though the Biden administration transmitted copies of the two-page report to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in December 2022, it didn’t see the light of day until sometime in late March when the Trump administration quietly uploaded it to a Defense Department website.

The potential COVID-19 illnesses from the American participants in the Wuhan World Military Games appear to have been a closely guarded secret of the Defense Department. Chinese authorities have suggested since as early as February 2020 that America could have unleashed COVID-19 into Wuhan through their participation in the World Military Games. Former Biden Defense Department spokesman John Kirby told the Washington Post in June 2021 that the military had “no knowledge” of any COVID-19 infections among the troops that participated in those games.

The first Trump administration issued similar statements regarding the Wuhan games. In June 2020, the Pentagon told the Prospect that it did not test any of the American troops that participated in the games because they were held “prior to the reported outbreak.”

The games were held within close proximity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Chinese scientists, backed by U.S. taxpayer funds, conducted risky gain-of-function research on the same sort of bat coronaviruses that caused the pandemic. That research, which was supported by former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, “almost certainly caused COVID-19,” Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright told the Free Beacon.

It isn’t clear, mostly because the Biden administration did everything it could to obfuscate the origins of COVID from the American people, how deep the rabbit hole of weaponization goes with respect to China and the coronavirus. This report has been out there for quite some time with very little notice from the legacy corporate media:

The Military World Games were held in the now-infamous city of Wuhan from October 18 to October 27, 2019, just before the Covid pandemic erupted around the world.

Many of the 9,308 athletes representing 109 countries who participated in the Games — among the most healthy and fit members of the human population — came back with flu symptoms. Now, a new report suggests that they may have been deliberately infected with Covid.

The report comes from Jennifer Zeng, a Chinese dissident journalist who interviewed an informant close to Dr. Shan Chao (单超 ), who serves as the deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s high containment lab.

According to the informant, Dr. Shan relayed that he had been given four variants of SARS-CoV-2 in February 2019 by his boss and was asked to determine which one was the most infectious to humans. These “bioweapons” — as he called them — were not natural variants but had been engineered in the lab, he said.

Dr. Shan further reported that several of his colleagues were absent from their regular workstations during the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan. One later explained to him that they had been sent ostensibly to “check the hygiene conditions” of the hotels where the athletes were staying, but that their real purpose was the spread the coronavirus that he had identified as most infectious.

Zeng’s informant’s exact words were, “One of the guys was asked to inoculate people from other countries during the event so that they can be infected and carry the pathogen back to the country they came from with only minor symptoms, which is pretty common in late autumn.”

We weren’t allowed to investigate much of this while Biden, who accepted millions of dollars from China through his son Hunter before becoming president, was in office. In fact, for virtually the entire time COVID was ravaging the American and world population, the approved narrative was that it was bat soup or cut-up pangolins in a wet market that were responsible for the spread of the virus and not bioweapons research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Now we know that was a lie. What we don’t know is whether COVID was deliberately inflicted on the world as a means of defeating an attempt by Trump or other populist anti-globalist leaders (like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil) to reform a very China-friendly globalist order, or whether the decision to weaponize that virus came later.

My personal theory is that COVID wasn’t spread at the Military Games, nor was it let out of that lab purposefully. I think it got out because like much else in China, quality control and proper protocols weren’t followed. Communist systems breed sloppiness, and the release of the virus was thus inevitable.

But the Chinese military and the Chinese Communist Party had a global bioweapons playbook already written, and once that virus got out, it was decided very quickly to follow it. I think they weaponized COVID after the fact by denying the world the facts about the virus, and I think they induced weak and stupid leaders across the world to follow nonsensical responses which had the effect of training people to accept a loss of freedom and also of creating massive amounts of economic damage that allowed China not to lose ground in economic competitiveness that otherwise would have been inevitable from the virus.

Either way, nothing has ever been done to exact punishment from the Chinese government for its role in spreading COVID.

Was the virus the product of Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak’s damned-close-to-illegal gain-of-function research funding? That’s entirely possible, and all involved should already have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But while Fauci, for example, has a lot to answer for, I don’t believe he deliberately killed anyone with COVID.

The Chinese absolutely did.

They knew what that virus was, and they closed the Wuhan airport to domestic flights while leaving it open to international ones.

That’s murder. On a mass scale.

Having an open trading relationship with a partner who brings you COVID and fentanyl? How stupid are we?

If this comes off like contempt for the Chinese, well, here is the goodwill they’re showing us now that Trump’s tariffs (and China’s, to be sure), are escalating:

Chinese memes on American re-industrialization rolling in. lol the music. 😂 pic.twitter.com/GZE2jHDgWZ

— Gabor Gurbacs (@gaborgurbacs) April 7, 2025

We’ve entered a new phase in the reordering of trade that Trump was elected to bring on, and it’s a phase of clarity.

At least for those of us not bought off by China, we’re now clear on three things.

We know that China is run by people perhaps even more evil than the ones who ran the Soviet Union.

We know that China sees its economic relationship with the United States not as cooperative, but rather as a means to achieve global hegemony without firing a shot.

And we know that China has no other means of creating prosperity and power for itself other than bleeding America dry.

This has always been about China. And while it’s dangerous to extricate ourselves from the 30-year economic fentanyl coma our ruling class has imposed on us on China’s behalf, it’s best to get this trade reset done now, rather than five or 10 years from now when it will be too late to reclaim our rightful position as the world’s economic leader.

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