(Article by Cathy He and Jan Jekielek republished from TheEpochTimes.com)
“China’s objectives are world domination,” he said in a recent interview on The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” program. “They intend to utterly defeat the United States.”
Drawing on President Ronald Reagan’s famous Cold War speech describing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” Cruz said the world is now grappling with a new malicious regime in the form of the Chinese Communist Party.
Cruz believes that to counter the threat, the U.S. administration should take a page from Reagan’s book.
“For the entirety of the Cold War, we didn’t get in a shooting war with the Soviet Union,” Cruz noted. “Rather—and Reagan understood this the best—we engaged in a systematic, comprehensive effort to shine a light, to use the power of truth, to use economic pressures, to use diplomatic pressures, and to use the incredible power of the American free enterprise system, to defeat them and to bankrupt them.
“We need to have the same comprehensive strategy—much like we did in winning the Cold War—we need to have the same strategy for defeating China.”
Cruz says this approach requires understanding the breadth of the regime’s aggression against the United States, from espionage to propaganda, intellectual property theft to malign influence campaigns; and its threats abroad, including domestic human rights abuses, subversion of Hong Kong’s freedoms, and intimidation of self-ruled Taiwan.
Hong Kong is the “new Berlin”—”the new forefront between tyranny and liberty,” he says, noting that since Beijing’s imposition of a new national security law earlier this year, the city has seen unprecedented restrictions to freedoms, which activists say marked the beginning of authoritarian rule over the financial hub.
Meanwhile, he said that Hong Kong and Taiwan are important because they represent “a beacon of freedom to the world.”
“It shows the weakness of the Chinese government because it shows the peace and prosperity of people who are ethnically Chinese nationals, but are living—or have been living, in Hong Kong’s case—with freedom and free enterprise and enjoy incredible prosperity,” Cruz said.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long promoted the propaganda that the Chinese people need the Party in order to prosper and succeed as a nation.
As a strident critic of the CCP in Congress, Cruz has drawn its ire: he’s been sanctioned twice by Beijing in the past few months, first for speaking out against the regime’s repression of Uyghur Muslims in the region of Xinjiang, and then its abuses in Hong Kong. Cruz has also introduced a host of bills, targeting a range of threats from the CCP, such as combating its influence in Hollywood and reducing U.S. supply chain dependence on the country.
He said that prior to the pandemic, there were a lot of people in Washington who were “China apologists,” including lawmakers from both sides of the aisle.
“They just saw a buck to be made; they saw the massive Chinese market. And sadly, we see that with U.S. companies. We see that with Hollywood. We see that with sports leagues,” he said.
“They want so much that they’re willing to do business with torturers and murderers. They’re willing to turn a blind eye. They’re willing to give the Chinese Communist Party the censor’s pen.”
The CCP virus pandemic, however, has caused many in Washington and elsewhere to fundamentally reassess the United States’ relationship with the Chinese regime, the senator noted.
Last week, Cruz joined a bipartisan group of lawmakers who called on Walt Disney Co.’s CEO to explain how the company came to partner with Xinjiang security and propaganda authorities for its live-action film “Mulan.” The company has come under fire for its decision to film parts of the movie in the region of Xinjiang, where more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are being detained in internment camps. The film’s end credits thank a police bureau in the region, as well as other government agencies.
“Disney thanks the police forces, the jackbooted thugs who are running the concentration camps,” Cruz said.
“This is Disney, for Pete’s sake. I mean, this is, you know, supposed to be like mom and apple pie.”
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