Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) warned the Washington Examiner that “China could win” a war against the United States “and we need to be open and clear-eyed about that.”
The senator from Arkansas has a reputation on Capitol Hill for being one of the Chinese Communist Party’s loudest critics. He wrote a new book about the threat of the CCP because he “wanted to ring the alarm bell louder than it’s been rung at any other time about just what a great threat China is to our safety, to our prosperity, to our way of life.”
“Americans have a justly low opinion of Communist China,” Cotton said. “Yet they still don’t always get the full picture of just how dangerous and threatening China is. And, in fact, I think maybe a central message of the book is, however dangerous, however threatening you think China is to America and to our way of life, it’s actually much worse.”
His new book, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China, goes into detail about the CCP’s decadeslong effort to improve the conditions in its favor on the global scale incrementally in several domains, including through military and economic coercion.
Taiwan
The CCP has long pursued the reunification of the mainland with Taiwan, and the United States’s long-standing position has been to oppose unilateral changes from either Beijing or Taipei.
Last month, the State Department removed the phrase “We do not support Taiwan independence” from a fact sheet about U.S.-Taiwan relations, which prompted a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson to warn the U.S. to “stop condoning and supporting Taiwan independence.”
The Chinese government is sensitive to international commentary about Taiwanese independence.
The People’s Liberation Army, China’s army, frequently conducts provocative military drills in the aerial and maritime domains near Taiwan. It has spent several years modernizing its armed forces.
Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, warned last month that the Chinese military’s “aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan right now are not exercises, as they call them.” Rather, he said, “They are rehearsals.”
China’s “increasingly complex multidomain operations demonstrate clear intent and improving capabilities,” he explained.
Taiwan produces roughly 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, which is a major component of its significance to the U.S. and the Western world.
If China were to take Taiwan in a hypothetical conflict, it would “plunge us immediately into a global depression, not recession, but depression,” Cotton predicted. There would also be “catastrophic cascading consequences in the region,” which he warned could include nuclear proliferation.
Culture
Hollywood and professional sports have wanted access to the Chinese market, which has given Beijing leverage to control the message. In several instances, the CCP was unhappy with China’s depiction in Western movies, such as Seven Years in Tibet, Kundun, and the remake of Red Dawn, and pressured Hollywood to make changes or risk censorship.
Kundun is a 1997 movie about the life of the young Dalai Lama, who, in 1950, saw his homeland of Tibet invaded by the CCP. In 1998, then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner traveled to China, where he called the movie a “stupid mistake.”
In the 2012 remake of Red Dawn, the young American service members were supposed to defend against a Chinese invasion, but MGM decided to change the antagonists to North Korean troops.
There are other examples of subtle nods toward the CCP’s preferred stances, such as displaying the “nine-dash line,” a Chinese-supported map outlining China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. The 2023 blockbuster hit Barbie included a map featuring a version of the “nine-dash line,” as did the 2019 animated children’s movie Abominable and the 2022 movie Uncharted.
The same can be said of professional sports, primarily the NBA, which has a large market in China.
In 2019, Daryl Morey, then the general manager of the Houston Rockets, posted an image expressing support for a protest group in Hong Kong against the CCP. He was widely condemned by the league, players, and the CCP, and he has since said he was unsure whether he would get another job in the NBA after he got fired by the Rockets.
Global competition and USAID
The U.S. and China have competed for decades to secure alliances and partnerships across the globe. The U.S. has used humanitarian assistance, primarily distributed through the United States Agency for International Development, while China has used its Belt and Road Initiative to make deals with developing countries.
One of the more contentious points of the first month of the Trump administration was its focus on reclaiming the Panama Canal due to concerns that China had infiltrated it.
Panama will allow its 2017 trade and development pact involving China’s Belt and Road Initiative to expire, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino said at a press conference last month after negotiations with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The Department of Government Efficiency has effectively ended USAID, firing a significant majority of the department’s employees and folding the remaining employees into the State Department.
Cotton downplayed the implications of shutting down USAID, calling it “a temporary pause on aid programs right now to take stock of what works and what doesn’t.” He also argued that stopping funding on some USAID projects could even be beneficial if it allows for money to “be better spent in fighting to push back against China.”
China, however, has already begun reaching out to countries affected by the freeze. It has offered to fund land-mine clearance operations in Cambodia, sought to provide Nepal with development assistance, and offered money to nongovernmental organizations in Colombia to replace canceled American funding.
“China is our pacing threat and continues this methodical incursion into our shared neighborhood, holding diplomatic, informational, military, and economic influence to export its authoritarian model to the region,” Adm. Alvin Holsey, the commander of U.S. Southern Command, told lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services Committee last month.
“China has already established a strong presence [in Central and South America],” he added, saying that “its predatory and opaque investment practices, resource extraction, and potential dual-use projects from ports to space threaten the security and sovereignty of our partners while jeopardizing the United States national security.”
TikTok
Congress passed a bill, which then-President Joe Biden signed into law, that required ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company that has ties to the Chinese government and military, to divest from the company.
The legislation gave ByteDance until Jan. 19, 2025, to sell the company or be banned in the U.S., but President Donald Trump extended that to April 5. Cotton was one of a handful of Republicans who were critical of the president’s extension.
In April 2024, when Congress considered the bill, TikTok sent a push notification to specific users urging them to reach out to lawmakers about the possible ban.
LUTNICK SAYS TRUMP ‘DOES HAVE THE CARDS’ IN TARIFF BATTLE WITH CHINA
“That’s not a spontaneous uprising of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights,” Cotton said. “That is an influence campaign by Chinese Communists over our politics. If they can do it for that law, what might they do when Donald Trump tries to increase tariffs, or when we increase weapon sales to Taiwan, or in a moment of tension with Taiwan?”
The Arkansas senator said he has “issues with all social media platforms, but this one is uniquely threatening because of the influence of Chinese Communists over it.”
Mike Brest is a defense reporter for the Washington Examiner.
