Barr Warns U.S. of the Chinese Communist Party's Agenda

Barr Warns U.S. of the Chinese Communist Party’s Agenda

Attorney General Bill Barr claimed Thursday the Chinese Communist Party’s global ambitions could be “the most important issue for our nation and the world in the 21st century.”

Barr said the Chinese government is “engaged in an economic blitzkrieg” aimed at dominating the global economy and replacing the U.S. as the world’s top superpower.

“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,” Barr said during a speech at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum.

From Fox News:

To achieve their goals, Barr said, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is utilizing “a wide array of predatory and often unlawful tactics” that include currency manipulation, theft of intellectual property, cyberattacks and espionage.

Barr said that the Chinese Communist Party’s “Made in China 2025” initiative “poses a real threat to U.S. technological leadership,” as China seeks to dominate a number of high-tech industries.

The attorney general further warned that the U.S. is already “dangerously dependent” in certain areas, such as rare earth materials used in a wide variety of technological devices and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).

“As one Defense Health Agency official noted, should China decide to limit or restrict the delivery of APIs to the United States, it could result in severe shortages of pharmaceuticals for both domestic and military uses,” Barr said.

The Attorney General also stated that China “has systematically preyed on American companies” by placing obstacles in the health market, adding that Chinese nationals working at U.S. pharmaceutical companies have been caught stealing secrets in both the U.S. and China.

“[T]he ultimate ambition of China’s rulers isn’t to trade with the United States,” he said. “It is to raid the United States.”