Since I arrived in the Senate over a decade ago, I have been warning about China—which I maintain poses the single greatest geopolitical threat facing the United States for the next century. My first year as a senator, I gave a speech urging that we can’t deal with China “by embracing arm-in-arm and singing kumbaya.” At the time, that was very much a minority view; all the Democrats and most of the Republicans disagreed. When they looked to China, they saw nothing but dollar signs.
The Covid pandemic opened millions of people’s eyes to the evils of the Chinese government. As a result, mine is no longer a lonely voice in the wilderness; now, I’ve been joined by a growing number who realize just how malevolent the Chinese communists are.
For me, it’s visceral: I hate communists.
And we very much need clear vision and a detailed, systemic strategy to defeat them. Our approach should be modeled after Reagan’s strategy that won the Cold War and defeated the Soviet Union.
It should start by shining a light of truth on the communists. Reagan astonished the intellectual elites when he referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” When he said Marxism-Leninism would end up “on the ash heap of history” and when he said his strategy in the Cold War was “very simple: we win, they lose,” Democrats and the intelligentsia derided him as an ignorant philistine. But when he stood before the Brandenburg Gate and demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” his words changed history.
We need to do the same with China. Speak with clarity. Call out their evil. Their murder, torture, thievery, concentration camps, oppression.
Like the Soviets, the Chinese are incredibly sensitive and vulnerable to the power of sunshine. For example, in 2016 I introduced legislation to rename the street in front of the Chinese embassy to be “Liu Xiaobo Plaza,” after the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was imprisoned multiple times for standing up to Chinese oppression. Repeatedly, I went to the Senate floor to try to pass my bill. And repeatedly, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat from California, objected. She argued that my legislation would irritate the Chinese government. Yes, I replied, that was the point. To shame them.
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In the face of Democrat obstruction, I placed a hold on every Obama State Department nominee. And the Obama White House freaked out, coming to me and asking what they could do to get me to lift my holds. “Pass my bill,” I replied. So the White House leaned on Feinstein, and she lifted her objection. And my legislation passed the Senate one hundred to zero. Unfortunately, the Republican House refused to take up the legislation (as I said, being soft on China is a bipartisan problem), and so it did not get enacted into law.
However, there’s an epilogue to the story. In the spring of 2017, I was having breakfast with Trump’s new secretary of state Rex Tillerson at his office in Foggy Bottom. We were discussing many aspects of foreign affairs, but China was front and center. Rex told me he had recently been visiting with his counterpart, the Chinese foreign minister, who had relayed China’s “top three” foreign-policy priorities. Rex continued, “Ted, it’s the darndest thing. One of their top three priorities is stopping your legislation renaming the street in front of their embassy.”
At the time, Liu Xiaobo had just passed away. But his widow Liu Xia had been placed under house arrest and was not allowed to leave China. Indeed, she still had not been able to collect the $1.5 million for her husband’s Nobel Peace Prize. I said to Rex, “Tell China, if they release Liu Xia I will stop pushing the bill. But, if they don’t release her, tell them I will continue to push it, and I will pass it. And you can tell them I’m not bluffing. They’ve seen that we’ve already passed it through the Senate unanimously once, and next time I’ll get it through the House as well, and President Trump will sign it.”
The next year, after eight years under house arrest, China released Liu Xia.
Why? Because communist regimes fear accountability. They fear being called out. Our strategy for Liu Xiaobo Plaza was inspired by Reagan’s strategy decades earlier, when he renamed the street in front of the Soviet embassy “Sakharov Plaza,” after the famed Soviet dissident.
A street renaming may seem unimportant, but it means everyone writing the embassy must write the name of the dissident. Everyone looking up directions on Google has to see the name of the dissident. And there is power in saying his name.
Just this year, I followed the very same strategy to call out Cuba, and unanimously passed legislation out of the Senate to rename the street in front of the Cuban embassy as “Oswaldo Payá Way,” after the heroic democracy activist who was murdered by the communist regime. When it passes the House (and I believe it will), every day the Cuban communists at the embassy—and everyone who comes to visit them—will be forced to look upon the name of the martyred hero.
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