OPINION:
Paul Heer, a retired CIA analyst for East Asia, now a distinguished fellow at The Center for the National Interest, just published an article titled “Engagement With China Has Not Failed: It just hasn’t succeeded yet,” wherein he dismisses arguments in Aaron Friedberg’s book “Getting China Wrong” about the failures of U.S. to reform and contain the Chinese Communist Party.
In Mr. Heer’s essay, he makes a brief reference to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, his only reference to the CCP’s manifold atrocities.
The Chinese Communist Party’s hideous record of crimes against humanity are well known. Mr. Heer knows that the Chinese government holds millions of its citizens in massive concentration camps where they suffer torture, slaughter and deprivation that would make a Nazi proud. He knows that the CCP has been sanctioned globally for the extermination of the Uyghurs and the genocide of the Tibetans. He knows that CCP imprisons and murders its citizens for such crimes as “counterrevolutionary thought” — the sentence imposed on 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, who died in a Chinese prison in 2017.
In his 30 years as a “specialist on East Asian affairs in the US intelligence community” surely Mr. Heer studied the career of CCP Party boss Jiang Zemin, who in 1999 created his Gestapo — the PLAC — to persecute people of faith and critics of the CCP. And of course, he knows that China operates a multibillion-dollar organ transplant industry, where organs are carved from the bodies of living prisoners and sold to visitors who are given a special immigration lane at Urumchi International Airport if they want an organ freshly torn from a live human being within 24 hours.
Do these facts support Mr. Heer’s assertion that U.S. engagement has created a more “liberal, tolerant China” as he writes, “there is in fact room for mutual accommodation and peaceful coexistence” or can he acknowledge that engagement has emboldened the CCP because it knows that influential persons such as he are willing to ignore the grotesque reality of life under the CCP’s jackboot because they support his work?
Is Mr. Heer’s vigorous defense of engagement due to his interest in preserving funding for his trips to the People’s Republic of China, speaking engagements at Confucius Institutes and other projects funded by the CCP’s United Front Work Department? Could Mr. Heer disclose the number of CCP-sponsored visits he has enjoyed and the dollar amount of CCP funding he has received?
Mr. Heer makes no mention of the carnage wrought by the CCP’s virus spawned in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which Chinese authorities deliberately spread across the globe, and the cataclysmic lockdowns and mandates, which the CCP pushed through the WHO and which violate the Nuremberg Code formulated in 1947 by the allied judges during the trial of the Nazi doctors, or statements by CCP officials, posted on Twitter, such as “Go ahead and Die USA!”
For decades, the CCP has declared the United States “Enemy #1” while laying out their plans to “destroy the U.S. from within.” In 2019 the CCP abandoned a trade deal and declared a “People’s War” on the U.S., deploying their doctrine of “unrestricted warfare,” yet Mr. Heer writes: “engagement still provides opportunities and in fact the best vehicle for averting conflict and fixing the U.S.-China relationship.”
So, does Mr. Heer truly believe that continuing to allow the CCP to infiltrate U.S. media, universities, science and technology companies; steal billions of U.S. intellectual property; and cripple the planet with its bioweapons while corporations ship our manufacturing jobs to Chinese slave labor camps, with no penalty or impediment, isn’t proof of the failure of engagement, but provides “excellent reasons” to continue with the iniquitous and shameful appeasement of the CCP’s genocidal dictatorship?
Around 2012, Mr. Heer was challenged about whether China had a maritime expansionism strategy. He and others at that time rejected this while repeating CCP propaganda that China only sought to protect its historic maritime rights. Now a decade after the Permanent Court of Arbitrations’ destruction of his assessment in 2016, is Mr. Heer prepared to acknowledge the failure of his judgment and the damage done to the sovereign interests of U.S. allies? Can he comprehend how his intellectually and morally weak apologia enabled CCP expansionism and brought humanity closer to the threat of war?
In 1976 my late father, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, wrote, “I believe the United States stands for something infinitely precious in human affairs: we stand for liberty and human rights. And I believe we need leaders who will not sit guiltily by while efforts are made to weaken it both spiritually and physically.”
Have the standards of conduct and human dignity fallen so low that former U.S. intelligence officials like Mr. Heer assert with such brazen confidence, “It is true that the gamble has not paid off. … Engagement in fact has not failed; it just hasn’t succeeded yet,” and not only will nobody notice, but worse, nobody will care?
Which side is Mr. Heer on exactly?
• Maura Moynihan is a journalist, author and lifelong analyst of the Chinese Communist Occupation of Tibet. Her website is mauramoynihan.net.
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