TRUMP ON CHINA • PUTTING AMERICA FIRST
would destroy it.” So too today. The American people are more attuned than ever to the threat that the Chinese Communist Party poses not only to our way of life, but to our very lives and livelihoods. And they will increasingly call out corporate appeasement.
If individual companies are afraid to make a stand, there is strength in numbers. As Justice Powell wrote: “Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.” Despite years of acquiescence to communist authorities in China, American tech companies may finally be finding their courage through collective action. Following the recent imposition of the PRC’s draconian national security law in Hong Kong, many big tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zoom, and LinkedIn, reportedly announced that they would temporarily suspend compliance with governmental requests for user data. True to form, communist officials have threatened imprisonment for noncompliant company employees. We will see if these companies hold firm and how long they will hold firm. I hope they do. If they stand together, they will provide a worthy example for other American companies in resisting the Chinese Communist Party’s corrupt and dictatorial rule.
The CCP has launched an orchestrated campaign, across all of its many tentacles in Chinese government and society, to exploit the openness of our institutions in order to destroy them. To secure a world of freedom and prosperity for our children and grandchildren, the free world will need its own version of the whole-of-society approach, in which the public and private sectors maintain their essential separation but work together collaboratively to resist domination and to win the contest for the commanding heights of the global economy. America has done that before and we rekindle our love and devotion for our country and each other, I am confident that we—the American people, the American government, and American business together—can do it again. Our freedom depends on it.
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