Peter Schweizer, author of the book “Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China,” said the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) entry into the WTO changed the global economic structure in large part because it unleashed the regime’s strategy of gaining control of America’s elite class so they would do Beijing’s bidding.
Schweizer calls this strategy “elite capture,” and the CCP’s plan was to target the top levels of big tech, entertainment, education, Wall Street, as well as politics.
“It’s going to give [the CCP] leverage over them [the elites] because once [the CCP has] sort of touched them and made them rich, or as some CCP officials have said, they’ve tasted the honey that they’ve been offered, they will not want to give it back, they will not want to give it up,” said Schweizer.
“So that gives enormous leverage to Beijing over elements of our leadership class.”
U.S. foreign policy and the conventional wisdom of the elite class was that if the West engaged with the CCP, it would become more liberal and less repressive of its own people, and it was this thinking that allowed the CCP to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the end of 2001.
Schweizer said this strategy not only failed but has been disastrous for the globe.
“The CCP has become more repressive, more aggressive on the global stage. So, I think that our political and corporate elites have a lot of accounting to do for their failure. Of course, they made a lot of money by pushing this position.”
He likened the elite capture strategy to decapitating U.S. leadership, leaving U.S. citizenry suffering. “But in fact, the head has effectively been cut off, it’s been co-opted, it’s been bought, and then so the rest of the body, which is the United States and the average citizen, suffers.”
By Masooma Haq and Roman Balmakov
