Counter Communist China in the U.S. and at the U.N., Ellen Bork Recommends

Defend against Beijing’s efforts to cultivate and coopt American elites

[“America has a positive role to play in advancing freedom and democracy in the rest of the world,” is one of the themes here at The Editors. I’ve been reporting that out by soliciting, from a variety of thoughtful voices, answers to this prompt:

What are the most promising, concrete, specific steps America can take over the next few years to promote freedom, democracy, and rule of law in other countries? What places and people would you focus on, what’s the case for making the efforts, and how, practically, do you get it done given the constraints imposed by the American political and fiscal landscape?

Today’s response comes from Ellen Bork. Bork has worked in the State Department, for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in Hong Kong for Martin Lee, and for a variety of nongovernmental organizations that work to advance democracy and rule of law. I met her when I was managing editor of the New York Sun from 2002 to 2008, and she had moved to New York from Hong Kong and was writing about China-related issues for the New York Sun and other outlets. — Ira Stoll]

After neutralizing international pressure to ameliorate its abominable repression inside China, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong, China’s Communist Party has taken its campaign against democracy and human rights global, reaching into democracies and amassing influence at the United Nations to achieve its goals. Here are two things that the U.S. should do.

First, a new administration should advise American citizens, businesses, and civic groups against participating in activities sponsored by China’s united front organizations and deny visas to and deport Chinese diplomats and officials who direct them. United front work has its origins in Bolshevism, and China uses its Leninist strategy and tactics to try to cultivate and coopt American elites, shape public opinion, and thwart or punish critics.

In 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called out the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries for its malign influence efforts at the state level and canceled a 2011 agreement with China that made the CPAFFC a sponsor of the US-China Governors Summit.  

Surprisingly, the Biden administration has encouraged the CPAFFC to continue its  activities in the U.S., including at the US-China Sister Cities Summit in Tacoma, Washington in July 2024. The head of the CPAFFC also visited several other cities early this year. According to the South China Morning Post, Yang Wanming met with the Stonebridge Albright Group, the Eurasia Group, and the chief executive of Las Vegas Sands, which has a casino in Macau. All of them know, or should know, what the CPAFFC is and does.

The federal government can’t do everything that needs to be done to educate American citizens about the threat from China inside the U.S. Ideally, former governors and mayors, from both political parties, and university presidents would launch an initiative to educate the public about Chinese and other authoritarians’ influence activities directed at state and local government, campuses, and civil society. Mitch Daniels would be a good choice to lead it. As president of Purdue University, Daniels, a former Indiana governor, acted quickly to defend the campus and its students, including Chinese students, from official Chinese harassment and threats.

Second, the U.S. should get more serious about defeating China’s self-serving misinterpretation of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758. That resolution gave Taipei’s UN seat to Beijing in 1971 and has led to unthinking acceptance of Beijing’s “One China” position. As Gary Schmitt and Michael Mazza write, expelling Taiwan’s representatives and replacing them with China’s was “a political decision, not a legal one” made even more damaging by the “invention” of a UN “One China” policy by Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon decades later. This is not an arcane legal debate. China may use an uncorrected interpretation of Resolution 2758 to justify China’s use of force or coercion against Taiwan and cast U.S. defense of the island democracy as a violation of Chinese sovereignty.

Other, earlier answers: “Don’t Lose Any Countries” Is Elliott Abrams’s Advice, by Elliott Abrams