‘They’re Going to Continue to Run Us Over’: U.S. Lawmakers Warn against Chinese Peace Overtures

In the wake of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to China over the weekend, lawmakers warn that China’s overtures of peace and stability are not to be trusted in light of the communist regime’s continued aggressive actions toward the U.S.

Following a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday, Blinken announced they had agreed to “stabilize” ties after a series of incidents, including a Chinese spy balloon hovering over the U.S. in February and aggressive military maneuvers near Taiwan a few weeks ago, have left U.S.-China relations at their lowest point in years. Yang Tao, a top Chinese diplomat, further proclaimed that Blinken’s visit “marks a new beginning.”

But U.S. lawmakers are not convinced.

“We’ve kowtowed to the communist Chinese under this administration, as you well know, for the last two years,” remarked Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) during “Washington Watch” on June 16. “We allowed a balloon of 1800s technology … to fly over our great country coast to coast and take pictures and take up every available secret that they could possibly steal that they haven’t already stolen. … It sort of reminds me of … when Chamberlain in England held up that piece of paper after he’d met with Hitler, and … said, ‘I believe we’ll have peace in our time.’ … China no longer fears us under Joe Biden as they once did under the Trump administration. And they’re going to continue to run us over.”

After Blinken’s meeting with Xi, the top American diplomat was forced to admit that China had rebuffed the U.S. request to reopen direct lines of communication between the two country’s military forces. In fact, the U.S. admitted that since 2021, “China has declined or failed to respond to over a dozen requests from the Department of Defense for top-level dialogues.”

“What message have we sent to them?” Burchett pointed out. “[China had] a secret police station in New York. … It’s over a year, and then we finally decided to do something about that. We’ve allowed them to buy farmland … that [is] strategically close to a lot of our military installations. They don’t fear us. They don’t respect us. This administration just showed weakness and poor leadership towards China from day one. They met with Chinese officials on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre. I mean, what kind of message does that send? … And we’ve allowed them free access to everything in our country. They’ve infiltrated our universities, our higher learning institutions, our research institutions just across the board. And we continue to let them do that. To me it’s very depressing.”

Burchett further contended that the Biden administration’s economic decisions have eroded the U.S.’s ability to effectively deal with the communist regime.

“The messages we send to them when we regularly reduce our sanctions on solar products that are made in China because Biden needs them for his Green New Deal agenda … why in the heck are we not developing this stuff in this country?” Burchett asked. “Why have we let the environmental community put rules and regulations on mines that we could get these rare earth minerals, which you find out aren’t as rare as we once thought? They’re rare because we’re not allowed to mine them in this country. We have allowed in some cases over 20 years of delays on mining operations. Yet we allow them to do it in Central Africa with slave labor.”

Burchett continued, “We allow them to mistreat the Uyghur population, basically put them in concentration camps. They have organ harvesting, just the most horrendous things yet. … It’s all about the dollar. And … they’re not going to take it from us. We’re going to give it to them. We are going to give them this country. And it’s because of the leadership we have in the White House.”

Burchett went on to discuss how China is continuing to build its influence globally while American foreign influence sputters under the Biden administration.

“Many of these countries over in Central America … that are close to bordering on us, and through the ‘Belt and Road Initiative,’ it’s a real simple operation,” he explained. “[China goes] into these countries that are probably not as educated and agree to build something of importance to them, a dam or a hydroelectric plant. … And then they come back and say, ‘Well, it’s going to cost a lot more.’ … And they bring in their people and then they control it and then they control the market on that rare earth mineral or whatever they get in that area, and then they sell it to us at a huge markup and we’re further enslaved to them instead of our State Department doing its job.”

Burchett continued, “Instead of spending millions upon millions on things like drag shows, which they do, and exporting everything that we shouldn’t be exporting, they should be exporting democracy and free enterprise. And then we get into this bind, and now we’re behind the eight ball. … You’ve got a president that’s been co-opted and corrupted by the millions of Chinese dollars, and you have a Justice Department that will not investigate. You have a media that will not talk about this at all. And so, you know, we are in a bind.”

It is through voting, Burchett concluded, that the situation can be turned around. “Twenty million so-called evangelical Christians decided to stay home on Election Day, and that’s what’s causing this from top to bottom. We’ve got to get educated. We’ve got to get motivated, and we’ve got to get mad because Jesus didn’t ask them to leave the temple — he threw them out.”