China Is Trying To Crush Christianity and Islam Alike If the Chinese government cannot crush Christianity altogether, it will attempt to reshape it in the image of the Chinese Communist Party. by Arielle Del Turco and Tony Perkins

In the campaign against people of faith, there is no line the Chinese government won’t cross.

On Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testified at a congressional hearing, highlighting the Trump administration’s efforts to stop China’s human rights violations and international aggression in its tracks.

Proud of the administration’s track record, Pompeo stated,

No administration, Republican or Democrat, has been as aggressive in confronting China’s malign actions as President [Donald] Trump’s … We’ve sanctioned Chinese leaders for their brutality in Xinjiang, imposed export controls on companies supporting it, and warned U.S. companies against using slave labor in their supply chains. We’ve terminated special treatment agreements with Hong Kong in response to the [Chinese Communist Party’s] crackdown.

 This is an impressive list of accomplishments, and the Chinese government proves every day that it deserves to be targeted in this way. China’s campaign of repression against those of all faiths is almost unparalleled.

Just this week, more reports emerged detailing how China is using the coronavirus pandemic to crack down on Christian house churches. The Family Research Council’s Bob Fu explained the situation to CBN News:

[Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s portrait was even put on the church pulpit along with Chairman Mao and the first line item of worship by the government-sanctioned church before COVID-19 was to sing the Communist Party national anthem.

If the Chinese government cannot crush Christianity altogether, it will attempt to reshape it in the image of the Chinese Communist Party.

News also surfaced this month that low-income Christian families are pressured to abandon their religious practices before they receive government aid.

 Local officials in one province told Christians to stop attending church services and instructed them to hang portraits of Mao Zedong and Jinping in their homes. One woman even lost her financial aid after she said “thank God” upon receiving her small monthly stipend.

At Thursday’s hearing, Pompeo once again reiterated that China’s abuses against Uighur Muslims is the “stain of the century.”

The most recent horrors committed against Uighurs to be exposed is China’s efforts to limit Uighur births. New research estimates that hundreds of thousands of Uighur women have been subjected to mandatory pregnancy checks, forced sterilization, and even forced abortion.

One Uighur woman who worked at a hospital recounted witnessing forced abortions:

The husbands were not allowed inside. They take in the women, who are always crying. Afterwards, they just threw the fetus in a plastic bag like it was trash. One mother begged to die after her 7-month-old baby was killed.

Such tragic accounts are a grave reminder of the suffering Uighurs endure every day in China.

And while as many as 3 million Uighurs languish in “reeducation” camps, the Chinese government has been putting many of these arbitrarily detained victims to work in its forced labor program.

As China seeks to financially profit from its vast internment camp system, American companies, consumers, and politicians should be making every feasible effort to avoid funding these atrocities.

In what is often described as the “open-air prison” of Xinjiang, advanced surveillance technology is used to track and control ordinary people as they go about their day.

Unfortunately, American technology companies have directly and indirectly aided the Chinese government in its use of technology to repress the Uighur people. And major technology companies, including Apple, have been linked to forced labor in Xinjiang as well.

Reports of the Chinese government’s repression of religion continue to get worse, even when it seems that’s not possible.

The Trump administration’s effort to expose China’s abuses, spearheaded by Pompeo, is important work. Nothing will change until the world knows about it. Now that China’s repression is out in the open, it is time for free countries around the world to join with the United States in pushing back on China’s oppressive agenda.

The "Yellow Peril," Revisited (As In Blaming Chinese People for the Coronavirus) This is wrong: Blaming Chinese people or Chinese culture for the pandemic only serves to reinforce stereotypes of East Asians as the “yellow peril.” by Anita Jack-Davies

This past spring, Asian students at Queen’s University indicated that they were victims of racial discrimination as a result of COVID–19. Their complaints echoed similar incidents of racial discrimination and exclusion of Chinese students at other Canadian universities.

This rise in anti-Asian sentiments is not limited to university campuses. The president of the United States recently yet again called COVID–19 the “China Virus.” While some American officials have tried to downplay the president’s rhetoric, others blamed China’s culture for the virus.

Despite consensus among social scientists that race is a social construct, xenophobic attacks on Chinese communities and Asians at large during the pandemic show that race has real life consequences for groups marked as an other.

Blaming Chinese people or Chinese culture for the pandemic only serves to reinforce stereotypes of East Asians as the “yellow peril.”

How do constructions of the Chinese as “diseased” inform their dehumanization and that of East Asian communities in Canada and globally? How does their dehumanization at this time mirror the techniques of racialization of other racial and ethnic groups that have often played out in popular media? These are difficult questions that can be better understood by examining the racism that Chinese communities in Canada and the U.S. have suffered well before they were regarded as members of today’s “model minority.”

The New ‘Yellow Peril’?

Chinese immigrants first arrived in Canada when Chang Tsoo and Ah Hong entered British Columbia to prospect in the Cariboo gold rush in 1858.

By 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act legally restricted Chinese labourers from the U.S. and resulted in Chinese migration to Canada and Mexico. At the time, the law was the first of its kind at the federal level in the U.S. and denied Chinese immigration for over 80 years.

The act was in place until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and prohibited Chinese labourers, both skilled and unskilled, from entering the U.S.

In a study of the historical antecedents of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), writer Carianne Leung found that Chinese communities in Canada were historically constructed as the “yellow peril” and their presence compared to that of the plague. Chinese settlements in the country “were regarded with the same hysteria as an infectious disease spreading across Canada.”

In 1885, a commissioner described Vancouver’s Chinatown as an “ulcer” and suggested that, if left untreated, would “cause disease in the places around it and ultimately the whole body.” At that time, newspapers discursively cast Chinatowns as relating to “disease and filth.” By the mid 1890s, the Vancouver municipal council included Chinatowns as categories for inspection, along with “sewage,” “slaughter houses” and “pig ranches.”

Linking COVID-19 with China invokes a well worn narrative of Chinese people as “diseased,” a link also present with the appearance of SARS in 2003. It is a technique of racialization that works to dehumanize via discursive practices. Language is used to cast Chinese communities as a foreign and dangerous other. In this example, the idea of illness, sickness and disease is invoked. A group must first be dehumanized and stripped of their humanity before their marginalization can be justified.

These discursive practices provide justifications for marginalization, distrust, exclusion and increased social distancing between Chinese communities and other communities.

A Technique of Dehumanization

Wherever a pandemic goes xenophobia is never far behind. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus reports of racism toward East Asian communities have grown apace.

In a CBC radio story, Amy Go, president of the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice said that many of her friends and family members experienced racism due to misinformation and stereotyping about the disease. Meanwhile, in the United States, Chinese Americans are increasingly becoming the targets of xenophobic attacks.

Earlier this year, a University College London student from Singapore was racially assaulted. The perpetrators, two boys aged 15 and 16, allegedly shouted, “I don’t want your coronavirus in my country.”

n a recent article for The Atlantic, Yasmeetn Serhan and Timothy McLauglin write that pandemics often isolate specific groups, as indicated by the targeting of Africans during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. With this in mind, the World Health Organization (WHO) refrained from linking the virus to a specific geographic location when it was first described to the global community.

Dehumanization is often the first and most insidious technique of racialization. The racism accompanying the spread of and response to COVID-19 must be addressed.

What Does the Word "Race" Actually Mean? Using race to describe inequality is misleading when what we seek to discuss are socioeconomic disparities. by Nina G. Jablonski and George Chaplin

Race-thinking has been discredited for decades. But it is still with us. Yet race is a historical contingency, not a state of nature. One of the most sinister things about race is that its sibling, racism, not only lasts, but continues to grow. Race has so co-opted our consciousness and language that any attempt to deal with the effects of racism has been very difficult.

The language of race was one of the questions that occupied us, a group of academics, during the course of a multi-year series of discussions that constituted the Effects of Race project at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.

The addictiveness of race-thinking thwarts all efforts to unite humanity into a common cause. New endeavours to utilise race for economic, educational, biological, and – most recently – genetic reasons continue despite the fact that people share so many overwhelming commonalities. Any subdivisions erected between people are essentially meaningless.

Many embrace race as a concept, but it mostly persists because the damage caused by racism persists. The economically powerful see race as a shorthand for class, intelligence, education, ability, as well as biology. The economically disadvantaged see it as the cause of their suffering and as a uniting principle. In both cases, it is a factor used to justify an Us-Them dichotomy.

What can be done about the durability of the concept of race? One thing we can consider is changing the vocabulary.

Language and Power

Language space is constantly changing, but the reuse of value-laden words has the power to reinforce past preconceptions and prejudices. Reusing old race words in new contexts doesn’t remove their original meanings, it only adds to them. The language-space of race is so crowded that new terms (neologisms) with no connections to past meanings are hard to derive, but a new vocabulary is what is needed because so many of the old words are derogatory and hurtful.

Neologisms like “people of colour” arose in the 1930s after “coloured people” became restricted to mean African American people in the United States. It was revived again at the end of the twentieth century as an inclusive group of people identified as anyone who wasn’t a person of European descent with light skin – “whites” – and who were subjected to differential treatment by the dominant white culture.

One successful effort has been the conversion of hateful speech by subjugated people themselves. The word “queer” was once a highly derogatory term for people who prefer partners of the same gender. Redeployment and repurposing of the word as a positive identifier has lessened its impact as a slur, even though it is still used as marker of Us-Them. In fighting homophobia, the upbeat neologism “gay” has been more effective at thwarting discrimination of non-binary sexuality.

Repurposing official race labels like the apartheid-era “Black” and “Coloured”, for utilitarian purposes of government and social restitution in South Africa, has not seen the power and confusion of those words diminish much. Any reuse or redefinition of race-thinking terms just reinforces all previous meanings.

What Does “Race” Actually Mean?

So, should we stop talking about race? In a word, no. We must understand the full expanse and power of racial language. Denial of race will not bring about the demise of race, instead it only cloaks terms that perpetuate the power of the concept and its potential for harm.

What we need to do is unpack the term “race” from other confusions surrounding it.

Do races have a biological reality? If race is biologically real, then it should only be defined by a biological meaning. All people living today belong to one species, Homo sapiens, and this species has never been divided into separate groups that were on their way to becoming new species.

People have always moved and intermixed, but, despite this, the concept of population isolation and a belief in “pure races” is common.

But species are individuals in the logical sense. Subsets of species, whether called subspecies or races, have no such individual reality. They are always in flux and have identities that vary according to the time and place of their definition.

The categories of race and ethnicity used by the United States Census such as “Black or African American” and “Asian” are good examples because they have very specific meanings for the census, but change regularly and are only understood clearly by people of the time and place the usage was developed. These widely used terms lack any biological reality, but that association still exists for most people because race started out as a quasi-scientific concept.

Let’s Find New Words

Race is not biology nor is it a linguistic-ethnic grouping. It is not class. Race is not shorthand biology or any other grouping definition. But continued belief in the existence of real races and the biological or social reality of the race concept provides justification for the continuation of a racially inequitable status quo – and the social marginalisation of historically disadvantaged groups.

When we use race we need to be very specific about what we mean. Using race to describe inequality is misleading when what we seek to discuss are socioeconomic disparities.

Let’s find new terms to describe these phenomena. It’s essential that we abandon official race labels and stop educating children about race categories because these concepts are freighted with toxic baggage.

We cannot just keep the “good parts” of race because othering has no good side. Race should be spoken about only in an historical context or in terms of current racism.

India vs. Pakistan: Who Would Win in a War? (Nobody) The disparity in forces, war plans on both sides, and the presence of tactical nuclear weapons makes a regional nuclear war—even a limited one—a real possibility. by Kyle Mizokami

Outnumbered and under-equipped, the Pakistani army believes it is in a position to launch small local offensives from the outset, before the Indian army can reach its jumping-off points, to occupy favorable terrain. Still, the disparity in forces means the Pakistanis cannot hope to launch a major, war-winning offensive and terminate a ground war on their own terms. As a result, the Pakistani army is increasingly relying on tactical nuclear weapons to aid their conventional forces.

The Indian subcontinent is home to two of the largest armies on Earth. Not only are the armies of India and Pakistan both larger in personnel than the U.S. Army, but they have stood at alert facing one another since the dissolution of the British Indian Army in 1947. The two armies have clashed four times in the past seventy years, and may yet do so again in the future.

The Indian army is the primary land force of the Indian armed forces. The army numbers 1.2 million active duty personnel and 990,000 reservists, for a total force strength of 2.1 million. The army’s primary tasks are guarding the borders with Pakistan and China and domestic security—particularly in Kashmir and the Northeast. The army is also a frequent contributor to United Nations peacekeeping missions abroad.

The army is structured into fourteen army corps, which are further made up of forty infantry, armored, mountain and RAPID (mechanized infantry) divisions. There is approximately one separate artillery brigade per corps, five separate armored brigades, seven infantry brigades and five brigade-sized air defense formations.

Infantry and mountain divisions are mostly assigned to the mountainous North and Northeast regions, where manpower intensive counterinsurgency and mountain warfare forces are important, while infantry, RAPID, and armored formations sit on the border opposite Pakistan. Perhaps unusually the Indian army has only one airborne unit, the Parachute Regiment, which is actually an umbrella headquarters for army airborne and special forces. The Parachute Regiment controls seven special-forces battalions and three airborne brigades.

The army is equipped from a number of sources, primarily Russia and a growing domestic arms industry, with increasing amounts of Israeli and American weaponry. More than 4,000 tanks equip the country’s ninety-seven armored regiments (the equivalent of American battalions), including 2,400 older T-72 tanks, 1,600 T-90 tanks, and approximately 360 Arjun Mk.1 and Mk.2 tanks. Complementing the T-72/90 tanks in armored and mechanized infantry formations are BMP-2 mechanized infantry combat vehicles.

Most of the Indian Army’s 4,000 artillery pieces are from Russia, including newer 300-millimeter Smerch multiple launch rocket systems, but the country appears to be turning away from Russian field artillery towards American towed M777 and South Korean K-9 Thunder self-propelled howitzers. A new howitzer, the Dhanush, appears close to widespread adoption. Air defense artillery, on the other hand, is dominated by Russian equipment, from battlefield Tunguska self-propelled anti-aircraft guns to S-400 “Triumf” high-altitude air-defense missiles.

The Pakistani army numbers 650,000 active duty personnel and five hundred thousand reserves, for a total strength of 1.15 million. Although Pakistan resides in what most would consider a rough neighborhood, it is on relatively good terms with neighbors China and Iran. As a result, the army’s primary missions are domestic security operations against the Pakistani Taliban and facing off against the Indian army. Like India, Pakistan is a major contributor of forces to United Nations peacekeeping missions.

The Pakistani army consists of twenty-six combat divisions falling under the control of nine army corps. Most divisions are infantry divisions, with only two armored and two mechanized infantry divisions. Each corps also controls an average of one armored, one infantry and one artillery brigade each. Not only is the Pakistani army smaller than the Indian army, but it features fewer offensive forces capable of attacking India head-on. Special operations forces are concentrated under the control of the Special Services Group, which controls eight commando battalions.

The army’s equipment is mostly Pakistani and Chinese, with Turkish and American armaments in key areas. The country has fewer than seven hundred frontline tanks, including the Khalid and the T-80UD, with another one thousand modernized versions of the 1970s-era Chinese Type 59. Pakistan lacks a modern infantry fighting vehicle, relying on more than two thousand upgraded M113 tracked armored personnel carriers.

Pakistan has nearly two thousand artillery pieces, primarily Chinese and American, but they are older models with little in terms of acquisitions in sight. Standouts among these are roughly 250 M109A5 155-millimeter self-propelled howitzers and two hundred A-100E 300-millimeter multiple launch rocket systems—similar to India’s Smerch. One standout category where Pakistani weapons outmatch Indian ones is the area of attack helicopters, where the country fields fifty-one older AH-1S Cobra attack helicopters with another fifteen AH-1Z Vipers on order.

If the two countries went to war, a major clash between the two armies would be inevitable. Outnumbered and under-equipped, the Pakistani army believes it is in a position to launch small local offensives from the outset, before the Indian army can reach its jumping-off points, to occupy favorable terrain. Still, the disparity in forces means the Pakistanis cannot hope to launch a major, war-winning offensive and terminate a ground war on their own terms. As a result, the Pakistani army is increasingly relying on tactical nuclear weapons to aid their conventional forces.

For its part, the Indian army plans to immediately take the offensive under a doctrine called “Cold Start.” Cold Start envisions rapid mobilization followed by a major offensive into Pakistan before the country can respond with tactical nuclear weapons. Such an offensive—and Pakistan’s likely conventional defeat—could make the use of tactical nuclear weapons all the more likely.

The adversarial relationship between India and Pakistan makes the Indian subcontinent one of the most dangerous places on Earth. The disparity in forces, war plans on both sides, and the presence of tactical nuclear weapons makes a regional nuclear war—even a limited one—a real possibility.

Microsoft Buying TikTok? Don't Get Too Excited Just Yet Moving ownership to a US company could help address concerns surrounding the perceived influence of the Chinese government over TikTok. But there will need to be strong oversight to ensure existing user data is transferred entirely to Microsoft’s control. by Paul Haskell-Dowland and Brianna O'Shea

In what seems to be a common occurrence, Chinese video-sharing app TikTok is once again in the headlines.

After months of speculation about national security risks and users’ data being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party, US President Donald Trump has announced plans to ban TikTok in the United States any day now.

In response, a deal is being negotiated between TikTok’s parent company ByteDance and US software giant Microsoft. If successful, Microsoft will take over the app’s operations in the US and potentially also in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

A US ban would not be unprecedented. India barred TikTok last month, alongside dozens of other Chinese-owned apps and websites.

According to reports, ByteDance has agreed to sell some of its TikTok operations to Microsoft. The deal, which is unlikely to progress before mid-September, would appease US regulators and could be seen as a way forward for TikTok in Australia.

Microsoft has indicated any takeover would include a complete security review and an offer of "continuing dialogue with the United States government, including with the president."

Moving ownership to a US company could help address concerns surrounding the perceived influence of the Chinese government over TikTok. But there will need to be strong oversight to ensure existing user data is transferred entirely to Microsoft’s control.

While Microsoft has pledged to ensure TikTok data are deleted “from servers outside the country after it is transferred” – it would be difficult to prove copies had not been made before control was handed over.

What’s more, a Microsoft-owned TikTok may not appeal to everyone. Some may think Microsoft is too closely tied to the US government, or may consider it a monopoly holder in the personal computing market.

Also, it would be naive to think foreign governments will not be able to covertly access US-stored user data, if they are so inclined.

Who Will Benefit?

Should the deal go ahead, it may open an opportunity for the Australian and New Zealand governments to align with a US-supported initiative.

Australia is still deciding how to proceed, with the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media due to hear from TikTok representatives on August 21. The committee has been tasked to look at the influence of social media on elections and the use of such platforms to distribute misinformation.

TikTok won’t be alone though – Facebook and Twitter are both due to attend. It is, however, unlikely the Microsoft acquisition will have much influence on the proceedings as the deal is still in the early days of discussion.

Microsoft’s acquisition may introduce fresh concerns about the US government’s influence over TikTok. Although, this is perhaps more politically palatable than potential Chinese government influence over the app – given the Chinese Communist Party’s unsavoury record of privacy abuses.

Perhaps the only winner from the deal would be ByteDance itself. A product that is increasingly disliked by foreign governments will only become harder to sell with time. It would make sense for ByteDance to cash out its asset sooner rather than later.

The deal would also likely earn it a significant payout, given TikTok’s millions of users.

Are the Risks Real?

Despite ongoing allegations, there is no solid evidence of a threat to either national security or personal data from using TikTok. Many of the concerns hinge on data sovereignty – specifically, where data are stored and who can use and access them.

TikTok has responded to allegations by stating its user data are not stored in China and are not subject to Chinese government influence or access.

That said, while TikTok user data may well be stored outside China, it is unclear whether the Chinese government has already secured access, or will seek to do so later through legal channels.

There are, however, other potential issues that may be driving the US’s concerns.

For instance, in 2018 an unexpected consequence of sharing fitness tracker data through the Strava website inadvertently revealed the locations of secret US military bases.

Thus, services such as TikTok which are meant to be relatively benign (if used ethically) can, under certain circumstances, present unexpected threats to national security. This may explain why Australia’s defence forces have banned the app.

Another Trump Power Move?

Threats from the US against TikTok are not new.

The country’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated TikTok was being examined by US authorities in early July. And suggestions of a national security review go as far back as November last year.

However, in regards to Trump’s most recent threat, one contributing factor may be the personal feelings of the president himself.

There are theories much of the new hype over TikTok could be a reaction from Trump to an ill-fated political rally in Tulsa.

A number of TikTok users reserved tickets to the Trump rally and didn’t show up, as a protest against the president. The rally saw only a few thousand supporters attend, out of hundreds of thousands of allocated tickets.

How to Stop China From Imposing Its Values America’s alliances were built to address a Soviet military threat. The economic bullying that Beijing uses requires a different kind of collective self-defense. by Anthony Vinci

On their own, few countries are powerful enough to stand up to bullying by China, and the existing security alliances upon which the world’s major democracies depend weren’t built to address the economic threats now emanating from Beijing. This spring, shortly after Australia called for an international investigation into the origins of COVID-19, the Chinese ambassador to that country threatened an economic boycott, declaring that the Chinese public could go without Australian wine and beef, among other products. Since China is Australia’s largest export market, this was no small threat. Subsequently, China blocked imports from major Australian meat producers and placed tariffs on Australian barley. More and more, China is using its massive economic weight to threaten countries that challenge its actions, criticize its leaders, or express sympathy for people whom it considers dissidents or separatists.

In April, Chinese officials threatened the European Union with unnamed repercussions if an official EU report described a Chinese “global disinformation campaign” related to COVID-19. (The EU toned down the report.) Beijing has threatened economic harm to German automakers if Germany attempts to exclude equipment made by the Chinese telecom giant Huawei from its 5G networks. Last year, China also threatened to impose trade restrictions on Sweden after a Chinese Swedish author was awarded a prize for persecuted writers by the Swedish chapter of the group PEN International. These moves represent a kind of economic imperialism. The Chinese Communist Party, which suppresses dissent at home, is trying to force other countries to abide by its authoritarian norms and use its preferred company to build their own essential communications networks.

In the United States, suspicion of the Chinese government is a bipartisan matter, but no consensus exists about just what to do. The Trump administration has implemented a variety of hawkish policies, including restricting semiconductor sales in China and stopping a U.S. government retirement fund from investing in stocks there, and the president himself vowed Friday to ban TikTok, a popular app owned by a Chinese company. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called in a recent speech for “a new alliance of democracies” to counter the emerging superpower, although few details were offered. The draft of the 2020 Democratic Party platform broadly vows to “rally friends and allies across the world to push back against China or any other country’s attempts to undermine international norms.”

The problem is that the United States and its allies currently lack the ability to respond to the type of geo-economic threats that China is making. Specifically, they need a means of taking collective action when Beijing attempts to use economic power as a tool of political coercion. No country should face such threats alone.

Many of America’s most important Cold War–era institutions, especially NATO, were designed to deter a primarily military threat from the Soviet Union. But back then, Moscow—unlike Beijing now—had limited economic leverage against the West. Global economic institutions such as the World Trade Organization were narrowly focused on trade agreements and rule-making to ensure fair economic competition, but did not consider the possibility of economic warfare or the danger of economic threats to force political concessions. Indeed, none of these alliances or institutions has been any help in addressing the Chinese economic threats against Australia, Germany, Sweden, or other nations.

Those threats also harm the United States. If China forces U.S. allies to use Huawei’s technology in their information networks, American communications that go through those networks could be exposed to the Chinese Communist Party’s infiltration. And China’s rulers have sought to enforce the party line on Americans. Last year, Beijing punished the NBA’s Houston Rockets when the team’s general manager offered support for Hong Kong’s prodemocracy protesters on Twitter, a platform blocked in China. The regime will likely grow bolder as China’s economic might grows.

New threats demand new responses. During the Cold War, the U.S. created not just NATO but also the CIA and the Air Force to respond to Soviet threats. The period brought about a wholly new form of intelligence competition between the West and the Soviet Union. This led the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to enter into the alliance commonly known as Five Eyes, which allowed unprecedented intelligence sharing among nations in peacetime. This approach would have been unimaginable before the Soviet geopolitical threat.

Similarly, a new kind of alliance—like NATO, but for economic rather than military threats—is needed to respond to the kind of statecraft that China is practicing. Under such a system, participating nations would provide mutual support when China threatens one or more members with economic repercussions for political actions. That assistance could involve the imposition of tariffs on Chinese goods by all member nations; the creation of a pool of capital to help a targeted nation withstand Beijing’s pressure; the release of strategic reserves of essential materials, such as rare-earth metals, that China produces and could withhold; and other forms of collective economic defense.

When China targets Australian barley and beef to mute criticism of Beijing’s handling of COVID-19, members of the economic alliance could all impose tariffs or other forms of economic weapons to force China to back off. If China continued to threaten German automobile exports to force concessions on 5G, alliance members might ease the pain by reducing their own tariffs on Volkswagens and BMWs.

This alliance would be open to any nation that wanted to maintain free markets and political autonomy. Use of its tools would have to be narrow: It should act only in cases where economic warfare is used as a means of political coercion. It would not replace NATO or other military alliances. Nor would it replace the WTO. In fact, it would be complementary, and provide a means of safeguarding the WTO’s goal of free trade, by countering attempts to turn trade into a geopolitical bargaining chip.

The United States needs to develop policies toward China that are largely consistent from one administration to the next. A NATO-like economic-security alliance could support a bipartisan consensus on China policy. It is compatible with the nationalist approach championed by the Trump administration—but also with the more traditional policy objectives of Democrats, including Joe Biden, who believe in building global alliances and protecting the human and political rights of smaller nations.

Up to this point, the United States and other democracies have tightly integrated their economies with China’s without fully planning for the problems that the arrangement presents. China has used this economic integration for geopolitical gain. Just as the U.S. needed alliances to deter military threats after World War II, it needs alliances that deter economic threats from Beijing now.

Gravitas: A warning to Xi Jinping from China & warnings from hawkish generals