Steve Yates is a Senior Fellow and Chair of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Institute. He previously worked at the Heritage Foundation, and as a national security advisor in the Bush Administration.
The following has been edited for context and clarity.
Federal Newswire:
The Bush administration came in for a lot of criticism after September 11th for not being focused on what was happening in the Middle East and what was happening with Islamic terrorism. We were, as a nation, focused on China.
Steve Yates:
During the late 1990s there was a lot of activity in Congress, in the media, in the think-tank world, looking at China as the looming rising challenge in the post Cold War environment. There was this moment of declared victory of the end of history, and it was all about the economy, stupid, and all of that. But in the mid 1990s there was a missile testing crisis in the Taiwan Strait, while Taiwan was having its first direct election for president, and the United States was snapped back into some national security awareness. The Bush administration came through a campaign talking about China as a competitor, a strategic competitor, in contrast to the Clinton administration's constructive strategic partnership, which is the notion that they were hailing as they sought to bring China into the World Trade Organization and normalize China as an international player.
Federal Newswire:
One would've thought that over the course of the last 30 years China would've become more open.
Steve Yates:
Right, this is the challenge between trying to aspire to outcomes that are better for us if they are achievable, but needing to take in the evidence as it presents itself, whether we like it or not. And so I use a shorthand and just call it the bet. I don't think I invented the concept, I think Jim Mann wrote a book that was along the lines of the China Dream, and he may have coined this idea of just calling what Henry Kissinger opened up as the bet, that if we engaged China to tilt against the Soviet Union at the time, but more broadly if we engaged them and empowered them, our differences would narrow over time, our areas of potential cooperation would expand over time, and that they would grow out of their problems.
Now, this began in one of the darkest periods of human civilization, the great proletarian Cultural Revolution destroyed mass parts of the population, economy, and polity of China, literally families being destroyed, people being killed, livelihoods destroyed. China was within a hair's breadth of not existing under communist party rule, we resuscitated them to withdraw from Vietnam and balance against the Soviet Union, but we made this bet. Through the 70s, 80s, and into the 90s, up to that period of constructive strategic cooperation ... partnership I think is what the Clinton administration called it, we were actively pursuing that bet. We also had the opening of the internet age, which was going to be this final frontier of freedom, a great liberating technology, where speech and association couldn't be controlled. Little did we know, looking from the 1990s through to the 2020s, how much all of these technologies could be used to profile and control people, would not in fact end up being liberating.
Federal Newswire:
When you take those things together, the automation of law enforcement and this concept of the social crediting system, is there potential for a disaster when it comes to human liberty and freedom?
Steve Yates:
Yeah, I would call it a digital Cultural Revolution 2.0. Because the end result is in the wrong hands this is extremely dystopian. It's very disruptive and corrosive of the institutions that allow a free society to exist and to thrive.
Federal Newswire:
Explain what China's social crediting system is, what is Cultural Revolution 2.0?
Steve Yates:
I'll just give an anecdote for how this has manifested right now in China. There is a requirement for you to enter a public transit that you have downloaded an appropriate app that has your vaccination status and is tracking your biometrics, that as you enter a building or a transportation facility you put your smartphone down onto a scanner, something else is looking at your face for facial recognition and biometrics, taking your temperature and looking for other measurable symptoms, and it will give a green, yellow, or red response. If you end up with the red response, you have no civil liberties, you don't get to board that train, you don't get to enter that building.
And worse than that, there's no escape. Doors lock behind you, the gestapo comes and carries you very carefully into a quarantine area for an undetermined period of time, all in the name of health. But these same systems could be used to recognize your face as someone who posted an unauthorized picture of Winnie the Pooh saying that the dear leader of China, Xi Jinping, looks like Winnie the Pooh, and it could result in the same tough treatment.
Federal Newswire:
And COVID just helped the Chinese government refine it and gave them an additional pretext. By the way we don't know how many real fatalities there were because of COVID in China, do we?
Steve Yates:
Correct, and there are no Chinese statistics on which you can base your reputation.
Federal Newswire:
Talk about the lab leak theory, it was dismissed as a bizarre conspiracy theory by the left. Now fast forward almost three years later, there's now a Senate report saying that it's entirely likely.
Steve Yates:
I started my career as a missionary and then an intelligence analyst, and so one of my earlier jobs was just to look at what evidence was being presented within China, whether it's reading open source news, or other kinds of communications, to try to deduce what's really going on. Because no one has accurate, transparent access to the truth in China, and so we're always looking at clues and trying to deduce the truth. No matter how compartmented or code worded a document is, it doesn't make it any more true or accurate.
So when it comes to COVID, it was irresponsible to intellectually dismiss the possibility of this being intentional, but China is known for lack of quality control, China is known for having no ethics to set boundaries on human experimentation, animal experimentation, or damage to the environment. And so the fact that there would be a lab that was known to the international community that was engaging in very risky and dangerous research, and that there were people in the federal government that had financial ties to that, it should have led that to being the first hypothesis.
So there was plenty of evidence that said the Chinese government is actually culpable in this, regardless of what the actual origins are. And I actually wouldn't go to the mat fighting to find the truth of the origins because scientifically and strategically I don't think it matters.
We know who was responsible for it being unleashed, and that is actually more important and telling than getting to the truth of how it was created. Because we have to stop who unleashed it, and by doing that we'll stop the origins.
Federal Newswire:
What is China doing internationally, through its Silk Road 2.0, this idea of engaging in construction and port operations with the idea of taking over these facilities down the road?
Steve Yates:
There's a couple of things that are particular about the Chinese Communist Party's approach. Number one, in the 70 years that the Communist Party has been running the show in the People's Republic of China, they have invented no new technology, they've contributed nothing whatsoever to a revolutionary change in their people's wellbeing or the world's advancement in technology. What they do is to digest, steal, and then apply the technologies that other people have invented and developed, and they are very, very good at this.
And so they have to go out into the world to control supply chains, control labor that they won't allow to immigrate into their own country, and after a couple generations of a one child policy they have a demographic problem, they can't sustain their economic model with Chinese people alone.
And so there is this neocolonialism about what they're doing to control access to minerals, access to ports, access to manufacturing platforms in other parts of the world, and they're doing it by compromising leaders, or what we would call elite capture, in different parts of the world to sustain this model that is not innovative, but is very, very effective in dominating market share. And over time people realize, oh, that new stadium, that new bridge, guess what? Quality control isn't good in China, and it's not good when they bring their construction here either.
Federal Newswire:
Do they then also impose financial terms that these countries can't meet?
Steve Yates:
They completely control the asset. And so if there's a commercial port, or venture, that then is completely taken over because of failure to meet debt obligations, then China has an unofficial base that can be used for strategic purposes of moving personnel, moving technology, proliferation, any number of means.
Federal Newswire:
We know from the 1970s that Maoism is a particularly pernicious form of communism. Tell us about the practice of Maoism in the 21st century?
Steve Yates:
It's pernicious in China and internationally, and including in the United States. At its core the Cultural Revolution was about destroying all that was good in Chinese culture for thousands of years. What people forget, because the Chinese try to hold out this 5,000 years of history, the Communist party of China has only been in power for 70 plus years, and it explicitly engaged in a revolution against all of China's past. They were attacking market forces, they were explicitly anti-capitalist, they attacked what they called feudalism, which was the cultural heritage and social order of China's thousands of years past. They attacked the institution of the family, they attacked institutions of religion, there was no free speech, there was controlled speech, and people who engaged in wrong-think would be de-platformed.
So all of this should have an echo with what people are experiencing today, that there is an alignment between what Maoism was doing then and what Xi Jinping is reviving with this digitized Cultural Revolution.
Federal Newswire:
Should people get rid of TikTok on their phones?
Steve Yates:
What happened with TikTok, and what was even alleged to have happened with one of the voting systems in a recent [U.S.] election, was the cloud-based data was being stored back inside China.
So some people would say, well, what difference does it make for my kid’s face to be all over the data cloud that goes back to China? Well, you are really underestimating the powerful manipulative nature of this technology. TikTok happens to be more addictive than gaming and the pernicious part of it is the Chinese government throttles these algorithms so that their kids are given content, ads, and other influences that steer them, so why in the world would we turn these manipulative powers over to a power that explicitly says they're preparing for war and they are at odds with us?
Federal Newswire:
On the issue of China buying up land, especially farmland in the United States, is there a danger?
Steve Yates:
There is, it often gets dismissed or minimized, I think that's a mistake.
I'd begin with the premise, and it's an America-first premise, but I think it's a common sense premise, that no one but American citizens have an inherent right to property within our sovereign borders.
It's a privilege. And it's a privilege that we open up to others, it can be good for Americans to have foreign direct investment, cooperation, et cetera. But should that cooperation extend to those who explicitly threaten our civilization, threaten our sovereignty, threaten our economy?:
Why in the world would we allow them to buy our agricultural land? Why would we allow them to buy land near military bases in the United States? They don't have this right.
Federal Newswire:
Are there problems with these Confucius Institutes on college campuses?
Steve Yates:
Well, as a starting point, the Communist Party of China has diagnosed Americans very, very effectively and accurately.
We want to be open, we want to make friends, we believe in who we are and how we do things and that others could benefit from sharing. We're actually interested in Chinese culture and civilization, music, food, art, all kinds of stuff, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the communist government is trying to use that good natured quality against us to draw people into a relationship of trust and then dependence and manipulation. So how does your interest in food end up undermining American civilization? Well, probably of itself it doesn't.
But it gets you into a situation where then the next step is, hey, well here are these other people that I would like you to meet. They don't happen to be great chefs, or maybe they are, but they also are card carrying members of the security apparatus of China.
Federal Newswire:
If you're a college professor, you're doing sensitive research, it can happen that way.
Steve Yates:
Of course Confucius is an historical figure that predates communism. The irony of it is the communist party had an anti-Confucian ethos as part of its revolution, but now it is using that history as an entree into American education institutions.
American openness invited them in, they got a toe hold on a lot of campuses, it came with money, and the sugar high of that money is something that our education institutions welcome. And over time what it becomes is an entity on campus that starts stopping the events that I grew up with, Free Tibet protests, or pro-Taiwan movements, or watching a film or even news coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre, real historical events, and they do it by social pressure and student militarization to stop the free speech on campus.
Federal Newswire:
Is the Free Tibet movement still a thing on college campuses, or has it been completely undone by these?
Steve Yates:
I have not been able to find evidence of it in recent times.
But that was the mission of putting these beachheads on campus. Under the guise of history, culture, and all of this, what ends up happening is it's used for thought control, curriculum control, activity control. So as Americans start wising up about this, some state and federal officials start putting the hammer down of you shall not have a Confucius Institute, we can't use government funds for said things, and we definitely advocate model policy that moves in that direction, but occasionally what happens is they change the paint on the outside of the house, put up a different name, in some other form it pops back up. So this is a constant whack-a-mole exercise, where we know they want to exercise this kind of activity, it is not something that is just like having French lessons in some other benign culture house.
Federal Newswire:
Now tell us about these fake popup police stations.
Steve Yates:
The upshot of it is that there was an association of sorts in New York City that was operating under the guise of some kind of a 501(c)(3), or a cultural entity, but the functional equivalent was of a law enforcement agency of China.
And what was happening was that they were policing Chinese citizens, but also militating people to pressure or thwart what I would call wrong-think. So if there are people that are out in broader New York City that are saying China's a problem, or the Communist Party is a problem, or otherwise telling the truth, that social pressure might be brought to bear against them. And if they were Chinese nationals, especially if they were dissidents, that they would live in fear of something happening to their families if they didn't straighten up.
Federal Newswire:
How was this discovered? What's being done about it?
Steve Yates:
Part of this problem is that there's an unwillingness for our leadership class to acknowledge that the Communist Party of China is actually our enemy, that it seeks to actively harm America, our institutions, our people, our way of life.
We have enriched and advanced this adversary in ways that are unconscionable. We have allowed the Communist party entities, their security forces, even some elements of the military, to operate on American soil in ways the Soviets never could.
In ways that Al-Qaeda and potential terrorist organizations never could. So this is a failure, a systemic failure on the American side.
They're in bed on business, they're in bed on culture, they seem to buy some of the talking points that these guys aren't so bad, and it's borderline racist to say that there's a problem from them, even though the Communist party is not an ethnicity, it's not a race, it's actually the enemy of the Chinese people as much as the American people.
So how it had come to be known is that people who were on the receiving end of this persecution started complaining enough to where it leaked out into journalistic coverage, it blew up.
