XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! China Lobby: Commerce Secretary Rolls Over for CCP.

China’s most loyal and lucrative partner is not a foreign government or national leader. It’s a group of multi-national businesses, Hollywood elites, ivory-tower intellectuals, weak-kneed diplomats, and entrenched bureaucrats located here in the United States. This group has championed economic integration and appeasement for decades, relentlessly demanding that America forgive every act of aggression committed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), no matter the cost to the American people. Some in this group are drunk on Chinese money, and some are blinded by a naïve hope that China will moderate. But all live in fear of CCP reprisal.

Now, this “China Lobby” has a new leader: Joe Biden’s secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo.

Secretary Raimondo recently stated that she thinks “robust commercial engagement will help to mitigate any potential tensions [with China].” This is simply wrong, and has been for over a quarter century. Since 1995, our goods trade with China has exploded nearly 900 percent, to over half a trillion dollars a year. Last year, China was our largest trading partner, and was responsible for more than a third of our trade deficit. It’s hard to imagine a more “robust commercial engagement” than the one that currently exists.

Far from moderating as a result of this generous and highly lucrative trade relationship, China has become increasingly repressive at home and belligerent abroad. China is now the most aggressive and prolific abuser of free trade anywhere in the world, responsible for up to 80 percent of all intellectual-property theft and the subject of nearly half of all FBI counterintelligence cases involving economic espionage. China’s economic predation has destroyed millions of blue-collar American jobs and costs the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars a year. There is no reason to believe that further engagement will yield different results.

Nevertheless, Secretary Raimondo announced plans last week to bring American executives to China and further entangle our economies. Secretary Raimondo is not only doing the bidding of the China Lobby — she’s actively recruiting for it. In an irresistible feedback loop, American businesses go to China, get hooked on cheap Chinese capital and labor, turn a blind eye to the CCP’s human-rights abuses and technology theft, and then lobby in Washington for greater entanglement with the PRC. Secretary Raimondo is contributing to this vicious cycle, which allows China to maximize the economic harm to, and internal divisions within, the United States.

The Biden administration kowtowing to China? Who could have seen this coming last year?