The CCP’s 7 Pressure Points and How the US Can Leverage Them: Michael Sobolik

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “The fact that America’s foremost geopolitical adversary controls an app that about 170 million Americans use regularly means that the CCP can leverage the app to influence the political debate of Americans, and ultimately … degrade the integrity of our democracy,” says Michael Sobolik, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and the author of “Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance.”

In this episode, he breaks down why TikTok is a major national security threat and how America can outmaneuver the Chinese Communist Party in the new U.S.–China Cold War.

For years, America has been playing defense, he says.

“To win cold wars, you have to go on the offensive to figure out: What is my adversary’s strategy? Where am I strong? Where are they weak? And how do I move the competition to that terrain?”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

*Big thanks to our sponsor for this episode Patriot Gold Group. Check them out here: https://ept.ms/3sr5LhH

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Michael Sobolik, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Michael Sobolik:
Thanks for having me, Jan. It’s great to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:
We’re here to talk about your new book, “Countering China’s Great Game.” You played a very significant role advocating for the TikTok bill that was just passed. There are still a lot of people that have concerns about the First Amendment aspect. Please tell us how this relates to your book.

Mr. Sobolik:
You can take the staffer out of the Hill, but you can’t take the Hill out of the staffer. Previously, I was in the Senate for five years and wrote a whole bunch of legislation, then pushed legislation through the congressional process with everything that that entails. But on the outside of the Hill, in the think tank space, I found that while you can’t formally lobby for a piece of legislation, you can do a whole bunch of work to educate policymakers and the public about the ideas in a bill. I leveraged all of my time in March and April on this TikTok legislation going through Congress, because in my mind, TikTok is the Chinese Communist Party’s greatest asymmetric threat that targets the American people.

Mr. Jekielek:
Usually I don’t take positions, but I’m very publicly known to agree with you on this.

Mr. Sobolik:
TikTok has the veneer of being an innocent social media app. For millions of Americans, when you unlock your phone, TikTok sits next to X, Instagram, Facebook and all the other American social media apps that we’re very familiar with. What is commonly understood about social media is that there are privacy concerns because your data is out in the open for anyone to exploit directly or indirectly, and that’s been the case throughout the whole internet age.

But the problem with TikTok is that even though it poses like a normal social media company, it is nothing of the sort. The parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, is a Chinese tech company, resides in the People’s Republic of China, falls under the legal demands and requirements of the PRC [Peoples’ Republic of China], and is ultimately answerable to the political whims of the Chinese Communist Party.

There have been documented instances of TikTok being leveraged to spy on American journalists, because through leaked internal audio recordings, they had revealed that ByteDance employees in Beijing had accessed U.S. user data. Now that in and of itself is concerning, because TikTok executives promised members of Congress in congressional testimony that nothing of the sort would ever happen. Then, of course, it came to light that it was happening, but the data issue is honestly not even the most terrifying part of TikTok.

The fact that America’s foremost geopolitical adversary controls an app that about 170 million Americans use regularly means that the CCP can leverage the app to influence the political debate of Americans. Ultimately, with the way they leverage it, they can degrade the integrity of our democracy when you are looking at content that is sensitive for the Chinese Communist Party, whether that is speech about the Uyghur genocide, the cultural genocide in Tibet, the Tiananmen Square 35th anniversary, or Taiwan.

On Instagram, there was a really interesting study on how prevalent these issues were on TikTok, and the discrepancy was startling. The CCP was starting to show up. The CCP has clearly foisted its information warfare and its own insecurities about free speech onto TikTok. It’s nearly impossible to find much information on these particular topics.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is in a context where TikTok is actually banned in China.

Mr. Sobolik:
Yes, TikTok US does not operate inside of China. There’s a sister app, Douyin, and it is time limited. Chinese people can spend an hour or two a day on this app. It is meant to further their education and their patriotism towards the CCP leadership. There aren’t these cute or cringy dance videos. TikTok in America is nothing like the Chinese version of TikTok.

The real concern is not only that the CCP can censor content and speech about China that they deem politically threatening, they could leverage it for offensive means inside of America to mess with our own internal deliberations. If the day comes when they invade Taiwan, they could very well leverage TikTok to sow disinformation about what’s happening in the Taiwan Straits and to mobilize American public opinion against supporting Taiwan. That could be a huge problem.

Mr. Jekielek:
We saw a mobilization like this when the TikTok bill was going through Congress. Please speak to that a bit.

Mr. Sobolik:
When I was a congressional intern taking phone calls, I remember being on the receiving end of a lot of these big call-in campaigns. A hallmark of our democracy is the fact that any American can call their representative and actually get through and talk to somebody. Whenever someone calls, any congressional office worth their salt tallies what all the phone calls were about and the position that each caller took.

With this TikTok call-in campaign, the TikTok executives leveraged the app to target their users in strategic zip codes of members that were either on The Select Committee on the CCP in the House, or the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House, because the House Select Committee was instrumental in drafting the bill, and the Energy and Commerce was the Committee of Jurisdiction. Those were the members they wanted to influence the most.

You had this huge volume of American TikTok users calling their congressional offices through the TikTok app. A lot of these kids threatened suicide if Congress took TikTok away, or in some cases, they threatened to murder the member of Congress in question if they voted in favor of the legislation. As a general practice, it’s a bad idea to threaten to assassinate a member of Congress. It tends to push them in the opposite direction of what you want.

The bill passed out of the Energy and Commerce committee 50 to zero, which rarely happens in Congress these days. It was a huge bipartisan moment. That’s not to say, though, that TikTok would make the same mistake a second time. The CCP, like any self-respecting authoritarian regime, is highly adept at learning from its strategic mistakes. As a tech company, TikTok has also made some mistakes along the way, to be sure,

But it would be naive for American policymakers and for American users on TikTok to think, number one; that they’re safe from foreign influence and number two; to think that they would be able to spot it easily. The information domain in the world today is so clouded. It is so perilously easy to be influenced with disinformation without even knowing it at times. This is why the relationship of TikTok to ByteDance is so crucial. TikTok is not an independent American social media company.

Mr. Jekielek:
We know through films like The Social Dilemma, congressional testimony, Jonathan Haidt’s work, and many studies that the big social media companies are not innocent actors. We know there is social media addiction. Why would TikTok be safe? Why would it be any different? The answer might be obvious to you, but it might not be obvious to everybody.

Mr. Sobolik:
Americans are right to view social media companies with suspicion. It is in their business model to hook their users to always come back for more, to stay on the app for just one more minute, and to hopefully turn it into two more minutes or five more minutes. As a regular user of social media and someone who tries very hard to be self-aware, I see this tendency in myself with how I use social media.

It is by nature addictive because it always asks you for more of you. It asks you for more of your opinions, for more of your story, and for more of your self-image. It wants you to believe that you can actualize yourself fully by living in this virtual space. The transaction that’s happening is you giving these companies more information about your consumer preferences, and they leverage it for their own profit margin.

There are many reasons to be suspicious of these companies. All of this happens on TikTok too. But there’s another additional layer to it that takes you out of the domain of privacy and societal health and into the realm of national security.TikTok is a national security threat to the United States.

If you look at it from the volume of users’ perspective, you have about half of America on a particular app, and that’s a lot. But if you look at it from a global perspective, you have an entire world that is controlled by our greatest geopolitical adversary today. You also have an increasing number of Americans that are turning to TikTok, not only as an entertainment source, but as a news source. Would we have accepted that during the Cold War?

Would we have allowed the Soviet Union to have control over or even ownership of the New York Times or ABC? Absolutely not. Under no circumstance would we allow that. In the course of the debate on this TikTok bill, this distinction turned out to be a key one. Are we concerned about the content on TikTok, which is a speech issue, or are we concerned about the conduct of the company, which gets into national security?

I appreciate your characterization of me because I think the First Amendment is the bedrock of our democracy. It sets us apart from other democracies in the world today. You could say things and express beliefs in America that you couldn’t express in other democracies in the Western world and the Chinese Communist Party knows that.

America is an open book and has been an open book ever since 1776. On the one hand, that challenges the nature of the CCP. But on the other hand, it gives them an opportunity to infiltrate and exploit our democracy from the inside. That is what TikTok does and that is what makes it different and unique from other social media companies.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please explain that to us. How does TikTok exploit our democracy from the inside? Often some viewers of the show will be suspicious of people claiming that things are threats to democracy, because we’ve learned over the past years that that term is used quite liberally.

Mr. Sobolik:
Sure. Let’s rewind to October 7th of last year. My wife and I were in India at the time with our son and there was a significant time zone difference. But we were seeing the same news alerts on our phones that everyone in the States and more poignantly everyone in Israel were seeing which was the Hamas pogrom targeting the Jewish people in Israel. It was one of the most devastating days in the history of Israel’s existence.

Literally the day after, on October 8th, the content on TikTok, pro-Israel vs. pro-Palestinian, was disproportionately skewed in the favor of Palestine and in some cases openly skewed towards Hamas, the U.S. designated terror group that controls Gaza. The promotion of pro-Palestinian content at the expense of pro-Israeli content was staggering. To be sure, public opinion polling bears this out. Gen Z tends to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than to the Israeli cause on the question of a two-state solution.

We’re talking about orders of magnitude above 90 percent more pro-Palestinian content than pro-Israeli content. This is after Israeli women are raped, babies are murdered in front of their parents, parents are murdered in front of their children, and hostages are kidnapped back into Gaza. It was one of the most grisly, barbaric attacks anyone could imagine. That is how TikTok’s algorithm managed information the day after October 7th.

It is no accident that Republicans and Democrats in Congress noticed this. I had former Congressman Mike Gallagher on my podcast a couple of months ago, and I asked him about TikTok. He is the leading proponent on Capitol Hill for doing something about the TikTok threat. Gallagher has always been a Republican and he told me that Democratic members came to him and said, “This is a huge problem, not only because Israel is an ally, but there is clear information manipulation on TikTok.”

Now, we’re seeing American users not only contributing to this skewed information, but also receiving this skewed information on their own phones, and it is impacting public opinion. It was an instance of TikTok leveraging an international security crisis to push a perspective that was advantageous to the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s no accident that Beijing has taken a position on this in the months following October 7th, and it has not been to stand with Israel. It has been to stand with Palestine. This caused a bipartisan awareness in Congress that did not exist before October 7th that we needed to do something about this before TikTok was leveraged by the CCP again.

Mr. Jekielek:
This raises foundational questions about our information sharing systems. Who controls them? They have been leveraged and that power has been given to the CCP. That is unthinkable.

Mr. Sobolik:
It should be unthinkable. I say that advisedly. During that debate over the TikTok issue, there were so many Americans with genuinely held concerns about free speech. But two things can be true at the same time. We need to jealously guard what makes America great, while at the same time, protecting the crown jewels of our democratic experiment from the people who would do us harm.

Mr. Jekielek:
We have learned how powerful these tools are. We did not understand how powerful they can be in shifting public opinion.

Mr. Sobolik:
It’s truly stunning.

Mr. Jekielek:
Without people even realizing they have been influenced.

Mr. Sobolik:
That’s the key. If you know you’re being influenced, your guard immediately goes up and you know how to filter it. Every single human has a filter created by your biases, your convictions, your own life story, and your experiences. If you can reach somebody without them knowing that you have an agenda, you can get past their filters. Again, social media in general can be very problematic. But if the actor behind that social media is the Chinese Communist Party, and the target is Americans, it should be unthinkable that we would allow that reality to continue unabated and unaddressed.

Mr. Jekielek:
The Chinese regime is obsessed with America. What is the Chinese Communist Party’s intention here? Some people believe that China just wants to be left alone. They say, “Don’t encroach on us. We’re going to leave you alone. The Asia Pacific region is our domain. America, just do your thing and we’ll be good friends.” That is one perspective that you hear often. What is the Chinese regime’s objective? What are their intentions?

Mr. Sobolik:
Let’s start with Xi Jinping and work our way back. When Xi Jinping began to assume that leadership mantle in 2013, he gave a speech not to foreign audiences, but to the Chinese state and to fellow members of the Chinese Communist Party. He laid out his roadmap for not only how he saw himself in history, but how he saw the People’s Republic of China in the history of the world. He said that Mao Zedong helped China stand up and Deng Xiaoping, the predecessor of Mao, made China wealthy, but it was his goal and perhaps his calling to make China strong and to return the greatness of China to the 21st century.

This is what Xi Jinping calls the China dream. It is not just this dream of material prosperity. It is singularly the reemergence of China as what it was historically and what Xi Jinping certainly believes it should be today—the most important nation in the world, not just economically, but also geopolitically and culturally. China has long been called the Middle Kingdom, and that identity has always been central, not just today to Xi, the CCP, and the Chinese people post-1949. This was China’s long enduring strategic culture, and this is how they really see their role in the world today.

The layer that gets a lot of attention today, and rightly so, is the CCP’s ideological nature and the threat that it poses to America. It is a Leninist organization, a brutal political party that operates for total domination and one-party control over an entire state. Anything that threatens that will receive the blunt force of political warfare. One explanation for why the Chinese Communist Party is so aggressive today, is because it is an inherently unstable regime.

This is the case for authoritarianism in general. If you have to subdue your own people to rule, then you’re always looking over your shoulder, not at external threats, but at perceived internal threats from your own citizens. For decades, the CCP has been openly trying to control speech about the Party globally, which suggests that they are especially sensitive to how they are perceived.

I would go a step further, though. The Chinese Communist Party poses an ideological threat, to be sure, but the geopolitical problem that the PRC poses to America goes beyond the realm of ideology. The goal of China becoming great again, as Xi Jinping is hoping it can, is tapping into a long strand of imperialism in China that predates Xi Jinping, that predates Mao, and that predates the People’s Republic of China.

I’ve worked in China policy for about a decade in Washington. A lot of folks will talk about China as if it suddenly sprung up in 1949 and just existed after the Second World War. Many will go back maybe one or two centuries to what Beijing calls the century of humiliation in the 19th century, when the European powers at the time carved up China. But when you listen to Xi Jinping’s speeches, that isn’t even his primary historical reference for understanding China.

Xi Jinping, in his mandate for China to become great again, referenced the dynastic era of China. He talked about the civilizational greatness of the Middle Kingdom and how it is now time to reactualize that greatness in the 21st century. There was an idea that permeated China’s dynasties, certainly from the Han Dynasty on, from the time of Christ, all the way through to today, which is that the Chinese emperor and the Chinese nation was meant to rule over all under heaven. Theoretically that means without limit.

In the time of antiquity, what that meant practically was that China sought dominance in its geographical area, whether economic dominance through the tribute system or actual geopolitical dominance through wars of conquest and self-defense. The gene which says, “We are the superior civilization, the Middle Kingdom, and we are meant to rule over all under heaven,” motivated this undeniable strategic culture of imperial expansion over 2,000 years of the dynastic era. China, in its imperial dynastic era, never knew a year without war. That impacts the foreign policy strategy of the People’s Republic of China today.

Mr. Jekielek:
The CCP has been very good at destroying the vestiges of traditional culture through the Cultural Revolution. But one thing that they didn’t destroy was the military doctrine which the People’s Republic has leveraged. You’re talking about thousands of years of dynastic development morphed into communist ideology. That is a terrifying thought.

Mr. Sobolik:
It is. It’s marrying the totalitarian ideology of communism with Chinese characteristics and Xi Jinping thought with the hard power will to dominate the world. The reason this is a problem, if China annexes Taiwan, if they invade or blockade and subsume Taiwan into the People’s Republic of China, I do not believe they would stop there. There is this notion that if we just give China a little bit of space and we don’t breathe down their necks and allow them to have their own Monroe Doctrine, perhaps they would be satisfied.

Perhaps it’s this overly aggressive presence of America that is causing them to act out, and their foreign policy is more defensive than it is offensive. I certainly hear that argument made in certain corridors of Washington, D.C. If you sit yourself in the middle of China and turn around in a circle 360 degrees, China has border disputes in nearly every single direction you turn.

There is the Sino-Indian border, which was a topic of hotly contested skirmishes back in 2020 in the middle of the coronavirus. If you look down to neighboring Bhutan, they are literally establishing settlements well past the recognized border, and they’re bullying the small state to accept a new reality and a new border. If you look in the South China Sea, they are literally redrawing the map not just with new artificial land features in this huge body of water, they’re claiming the entire body of water as sovereign territory of the PRC. Vietnam and the Philippines are hit the hardest.

Mr. Jekielek:
Much to the chagrin of the countries in the region.

Mr. Sobolik:
Absolutely. I was recently speaking with some representatives from Central Asian nations, and one of them was from Mongolia. She said, “If Beijing gets Taiwan, we’re up next.” That fear is merited, not only because of the power differential between the PRC and Mongolia, but the broader neighborhood that Mongolia sits in where you have the far northeast of Russia that used to be Chinese territory.

Russia victimized China perhaps more than any other European power in the 19th century when it comes to how much land was seized. The Chinese have not forgotten that. The demographics and the economic trends of far northeastern Russia are trending away from Moscow’s favor and toward Beijing’s favor. For geopolitical reasons they are aligned today against America, but they also have a whole lot of bad blood between them.

Mr. Jekielek:
Tell us about their obsession with America. Is this something you touch on heavily in your book?

Mr. Sobolik:
Heavily. They are obsessed with the United States because we stand in their way. America stands in their way, sometimes without Americans even realizing we stand in their way. As an American living either in Dallas or Topeka or Des Moines, you’re going about your normal day. You’re going to the grocery store. You’re dropping your kids off at school. You’re getting a latte at Starbucks.

You vote in November whenever there’s an election. Perhaps you’re involved in local government, maybe not. But you’re living your life as you normally would. The thought that Americans are standing in the way of the ambitions of a revisionist, totalitarian state probably doesn’t ever cross the mind of the average American, nor would anyone expect it to.

But from the perspective of Xi Jinping, the United States stands in the way of China becoming great again. They have been obsessed with the United States for decades. In 2013, Document Number 9 was released a few months before Xi Jinping rolled out the Belt and Road Initiative. It is a fascinating expression of why the Chinese Communist Party feels so threatened by the United States and by everything we stand for.

If you read it, there are seven grievances that Beijing has with the West in general, but specifically with America. The very first grievance that the Party mentions is that the CCP is under attack by this notion that the Chinese Constitution actually means something. One of the favorite punchlines of American senators and congressmen is to talk about how the PRC actually has a constitution, but it’s a farcical document that means nothing, because the rule of the Party is the only thing that matters.

But the fact is they do have a constitution, which in theory guarantees rights to the Chinese people. It’s on paper, but it has no meaning in reality. In Document Number 9, the first thing the CCP says is that anyone who tries to hold us accountable to our own constitution is threatening China, which is a pretty stark position to take. They are not only offended by the notion of the rule of law, but they see anyone who calls them out for not abiding by their own constitution as a threat to their legitimacy.

The second grievance basically says the United States keeps talking about democracy and liberty as if it’s a universal value, and the CCP takes great umbrage to the notion that freedom is a universally held value. For a lot of Americans, their antenna could go up when they hear that, because our own politicians have mishandled that belief. For instance, we went into Afghanistan and Iraq thinking. “Everybody wants freedom, so these wars are going to be easy to win.” Even Americans can sometimes forget what these values actually mean and what they don’t mean.

Even putting that aside, when the CCP hears talk about the universal value of democracy and freedom and this yearning to be free, that challenges the single-party dictatorship of the party inside of China, because individual will has no meaning in the PRC today. The unquestioned leadership of the PRC is all that matters, and they want to be the arbiter of what democracy means.

Another grievance they talk about is freedom of the press. In Document Number Nine, it literally says, “The West will talk about the media as the fourth estate, but the media needs to be tutored under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.” The final paragraph of this document is the most striking. They say that public opinion needs to be purified under the direction of the CCP.

Now, that word purify almost has a religious overtone to it, and that’s one of the great ironies of the Chinese Communist Party. It is an atheistic organization, but it has essentially put itself in the place of God, which is what tyranny is by definition. The document goes on to complain about America trying to hold China accountable for economic reforms, for having a free and open economy, for moving away from state-owned enterprises, and for having a truly free market inside of their country. The CCP feels threatened by that because they know that economic liberalization tends to encourage political liberalization, and that’s the last thing the party wants inside of China.

They also talk about this term historical nihilism. What the CCP means by that is having the temerity to question that Mao Zedong’s leadership was for the better. If any American were to bring up the genocide of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, or the problems of the Cultural Revolution during the 60s and 70s in China, or the Great Leap Forward with the huge famines that permeated China before the Cultural Revolution, all these data points that signal that the Chinese Communist Party is not governing so well, they would call that historical nihilism. That means you are denying the success and the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party, and have the gall to question the wisdom and ability of Mao, Deng, Xi, these true paramount leaders in China’s history. That’s what they would call historical nihilism.

Mr. Jekielek:
Another piece is simply questioning the ideology at all.

Mr. Sobolik:
Absolutely. You can’t even have the thought cross your mind, “I disagree with this. I have the agency to express that.” That is what they have been trying to stamp out inside of the People’s Republic of China for decades. They do that overtly. I was in China most recently in 2018 and the first time I was there was 2010. The Chinese Communist Party was still in control back then, but it was a different China in 2010. It was far more open than it has been recently.

I remember in 2010, I was on this overnight train in the middle of the Shanxi province with university students who were aspiring party members. I had my Bible and I was reading Scripture. They asked me what I thought about Christianity, if I really believed the entirety of Scripture, and big existential questions like that.

Then I went back to China for a second time in 2018. I remember being in Beijing, looking out over the city, and just having a distinct feeling. You can’t always see it, you don’t know when it’s going to strike, but there’s a hammer in the sky.

That’s what it’s like to live in a totalitarian nation—you lose your agency to question anything. They’re trying to stamp out questioning the ideology of the party, to be sure. They view America as standing in their way, just by us standing for the values we care about; freedom and liberty. They view that as an attack on their political system. Just by being an American and believing in America, you are standing in the way of the CCP.

Mr. Jekielek:
They have deployed extensive influence operations to subvert the American view. This obviously touches on TikTok as well.

Mr. Sobolik:
The trick for them is they have the luxury of overtly squashing freedom of expression inside of China. They have to do it covertly outside of their own borders, but that same motive is what drives them. They have a defensive motive because they, like any Leninist totalitarian organization, are fearful of their own people. They do know that their political legitimacy comes not from the consent of the governed, but from the barrel of a gun, to borrow a very important quote from Mao.

Yes, they have their own insecure, defensive reasons for leveraging projects like TikTok. Due to its covert nature, it allowed them for a period of time to slip in undetected in the United States. This is the case across the board. When I was in the Senate in 2017, the topic of the Confucius Institutes was the first big realization that our universities had a CCP beachhead inside of them and it was done in such a way that was in compliance with U.S. laws. Confucius Institutes are legal 501(c)(3) organizations. They don’t do anything illegal inside of America.

With TikTok, if you lie under oath to a congressional committee, that’s a problem which is going to mean legal exposure. But we had to pass a new law to target TikTok. They weren’t really violating other laws that would have allowed us to go after them from a national security perspective. They covertly leverage the openness of a true democracy to degrade and weaken our political system. Not only do they have defensive motives for waging this information war, they do it to tear us apart.

Mr. Jekielek:
Since we’re talking about TikTok again, there are concerns about the law that was passed. It provides too much latitude for the U.S. government to challenge the First Amendment itself. Obviously, you’ve thought about this. One example is that it gives the president too much power where he could arbitrarily ban another app that was inconvenient. How is this avoided in this bill which clearly is designed to force the divestment of TikTok from the CCP?

Mr. Sobolik:
That Jeffersonian impulse to be wary of what our own government could do in the process of national security is a good gut check for every single American to have. Members of Congress and any president should be ready and willing to have that conversation and be open to that scrutiny. On balance, the TikTok legislation walked that line very carefully, deliberately, and judiciously. The law itself has a number of different gates that you would have to walk through to get to the place of a president designating a social media company to be a threat under the authorities inside of the statute.

The first gate that you have to walk through is. “Are you a social media company?” That’s a pretty easy yes or no. The law has a clear-cut definition of what that means. The second gate is where the crux of things start to really come in here. It asks, “Do you have an ownership or control relationship with a parent company that is domiciled in a nation that’s a national security threat to the United States and those are clearly defined?”

Mr. Jekielek:
This is one of the concerns. They are not defined in the bill. They’re defined in Title 10 or somewhere else.

Mr. Sobolik:
This was good legislation on the part of the members of Congress who wrote it. It’s always beneficial and better to key into a pre-existing statute whenever you can. Number one; don’t reinvent the wheel. Number two; if you’re pooling definitions from a law that’s been on the books for years that’s a more stable legal standing for you to be in.

The bill references a provision in Title 10 that defines foreign adversaries of the United States as four countries; the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation, Iran, and North Korea. If a president wanted to expand that list they would need to have Congress pass an entirely new law for it to expand to more countries beyond those four. That is a good check and it should be difficult to raise that threshold.

Mr. Jekielek:
I believe the threshold is 20 percent foreign ownership. Control was another issue. What actually constitutes control?

Mr. Sobolik:
The ownership question is pretty easy to dispense with. The 20 percent threshold was borrowed from the law that limits foreign ownership of broadcasting in the United States. The question was, “If we have limits on foreign ownership of our broadcasting and radio waves, why wouldn’t we have a similar threshold for social media, especially as it is becoming a news source in its own right?”

The control element turned out to be one of the more contentious issues in this public debate that we had over the TikTok bill. The questions raised were, “What does control mean? How defined or ill-defined is this concept? Could a president leverage that provision to go after a political target? Could a Democratic president leverage this bill to go after X, formerly Twitter, because of a political beef with Elon Musk, or Elon Musk’s exposure to China by virtue of Tesla.?”

On one level, it’s understandable why a lot of Americans had these questions. It’s good to have a gut check to look for any loopholes in the law. But there were a few analytical mistakes that were made along the way
that got people to certain conclusions.

Control is not the same thing as influence. Undoubtedly, Elon Musk is influenced by Tesla’s exposure to China. That’s one of the many China beats I had been watching over the past few years since he bought Twitter and turned it into X. Would there be any way you could trace a relationship of influence? But influence is not control. They are two distinct things.

One legislative bill that I helped draft when I was working for Senator Cruz got into the difference between ownership and control when it came to sovereign immunity. Control means that the company in question is essentially a facade and a front for the actual organization that controls the day-to-day and strategic decision-making and the market actions of that company.

Nobody in the People’s Republic of China has that relationship with X. Nobody has that relationship with Elon Musk. If a president were ever to try to leverage this law to go after X or any other social media company that didn’t have that official ownership or control relationship to a foreign adversary, they would run into two problems.

Number one; the law mandates an interagency review that would have to pass muster from several different agencies and departments and cabinet level officials for the president to even be able to label this a national security threat. Problem number one, “Can you get this entire interagency bureaucracy without leaking to the press in the process that this is what’s under consideration?” I don’t think so. Could you even do that? It is doubtful.

Even if you could, the judicial review in section three of the law is keyed into the DC circuit. There is no way that any court in the United States would uphold the blurring between influence and control. Not only does it go against legal precedent, it completely contradicts how the whole element of control is understood in other U.S. laws that have already been adjudicated on. It is an interesting thought experiment. I see no bearing of concern that that would actually be successful.

Mr. Jekielek:
In their judicial challenge to the law once after it was signed, ByteDance revealed something. We also have to talk about the Belt and Road Initiative [BRI], because you explain this is how the CCP is encroaching on the world.

Mr. Sobolik:
Yes. It’s amazing what happens when your government relations lobbyists stop writing talking points and your lawyers have to write a legal brief. In this legal brief, TikTok couldn’t hide behind their talking points anymore. In this filing where they challenged the law, they said explicitly, “You should strike down this law, because the PRC will not allow us to divest from ByteDance,” which is a huge admission for them to make.

In this legal filing, the reason was that TikTok’s algorithm is under export control by the People’s Republic of China. That underscores how tightly interwoven ByteDance and TikTok really are. It also underscores that this technology is so important, the algorithm is under a state-sanctioned export control.

Mr. Jekielek:
It is a state secret in itself, not just a proprietary secret.

Mr. Sobolik:
Yes. This just gave away their game. But as important as this whole TikTok win was for the China hawk policy community, for the United States, it’s also a defensive win. It was good housekeeping on our part to take care of our own information space. But you don’t get a gold star in great power competition for doing the bare minimum. We are in a Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party.

To win a Cold War, you have to go on the offensive to figure out, “What is my adversary’s strategy? Where am I strong? Where are they weak? How do I move the competition to that terrain?” One of the biggest reasons I wrote, “Countering China’s Great Game,” is because I left the Hill seeing a lot of legislative activity countering China’s malign influence inside of the United States.

But I didn’t really see American policymakers figuring out, “Where are they weak? How can we exploit the CCP’s vulnerabilities and force them into strategic terrain they don’t want to be in? How can we make their worst nightmares in document number nine come true in the way we compete with them?” We have not gotten into that strategic space.

When I wrote, “Countering China’s Great Game,” I focused on the Belt and Road Initiative, because it is Xi Jinping’s gambit to change the world without firing a shot. That’s essentially what the Belt and Road is. A lot of folks misunderstand it and view it primarily as a huge infrastructure project, which in part it is.

If you really want to understand something, you have to understand it on your adversary’s terms. Xi Jinping has defined the Belt and Road Initiative as a five-point policy project. Infrastructure is number three. It’s not even number one. Number one is policy coordination between the PRC and the partner nations that sign up for the Belt and Road.

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you know what that means? That’s very euphemistic.

Mr. Sobolik:
Yes, it’s highly euphemistic. The Solomon Islands in the Pacific, a Belt and Road partner of Beijing, signed on and not long after there was law enforcement cooperation between the PRC and the Solomon Islands. When we talk about law enforcement, we’re not talking about the NYPD. We’re talking about the internal security apparatus of a Leninist regime.

If it’s not enforcing law and order, it’s enforcing political subservience on the people. That is what results from signing on to the Belt and Road. What also happened, not just in the Solomon’s, but in Cambodia, in Djibouti, Africa, in Argentina, and in Latin America, was the militarization of the Belt and Road.

This is what’s really happening now that has me concerned. They are leveraging the political understanding that Beijing has with all their Belt and Road partners. They are seeking strategic choke points and strategic locations in the world to expand the military presence and the operations of the People’s Liberation Army.

This is happening under the noses of American policymakers, much like they redrew the map in the South China Sea under our own noses. By the time we realized what they were doing, it was too late. One of the big fears that I talk about in the book is they’re scaling that up at a global scale now. If we wait too long to counter them, we are not going to like the world we’re going to be living in.

Mr. Jekielek:
Some of their partners like Italy have been excreting themselves from the Belt and Road Initiative.

Mr. Sobolik:
Yes. Our staunch ally, the Philippines, I don’t believe they formally
withdrew, but they canceled a series of Belt and Road projects. That happened around the same time that Beijing was getting increasingly belligerent with Manila in the South China Sea. For those Belt and Road partners that are on the margin, it’s a huge strategic opportunity for the United States to tilt them in our direction. In order to do that, we need to have a credible alternative, which has been really tricky for us to come up with at cost.

You need to make it easy for them to say, “Yes.” One of the ways you make it easier for them to choose America over Beijing is by targeting the weak nodes of the Belt and Road. One of the most important parts of the book is the final chapter. In previous parts of the book I talk about targeting the global vulnerabilities of the BRI. But the roots of the BRI’s exposure trace back to China.

If you look at the terrestrial component of the Belt and Road initiative crisscrossing the Eurasia landmass, half of the trade corridors run through Xinjiang, which is where the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs is happening. Xi Jinping has talked about Xinjiang as a Belt and Road hub for years. It is no accident that the trade infrastructure in Xinjiang was being constructed at the exact same time that the re-education camps were being constructed for the Uyghurs.

This is not just an ideological genocide. It is a genocide that is tied into the geopolitical ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party. Not all, but some of that trade is denominated in U.S. dollars. One thing that we could do, and I put this forward as a policy solution in the book, is we should present Beijing with the same challenge that we presented to al-Qaeda after 9-11.

Back then we said, “You can use the U.S. dollar to fund acts of terrorism, or you can use it to engage in the global financial system, but you can’t do both. You have to make a choice. What do you want to do?” At the end of the day, that choice was really foisted onto American banks. We said, “You need to know who your customers are. It’s on you to make sure that none of your correspondent accounts are being opened by terrorists.” It was highly effective and one of the most powerful financial tools we’ve had in the war against terrorism.

We should have a similar approach to the Chinese Communist Party today. We can say, “You can either use the U.S. dollar for legitimate commercial transactions, or you can use it to profit off of a genocide that you’re committing, but you cannot do both.” The trick here is to target not only the PRC entities on one side of the transaction, but also the other party, whether they’re in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Berlin, Paris, or anywhere in between. We have significant leverage by virtue of the dollar still being the dominant currency today. It could be a powerful weapon, one that we couldn’t really come back from if we were to leverage it, but I think we should if we want to win a Cold War.

I’ll bring up one final example here. If the CCP is so focused on exporting censorship through the digital Silk Road, which is the technological component of the Belt and Road Initiative, if they are exporting the means of surveillance globally to make it easier for other governments to silence and censor their own people, it’s not just enough for us to push back against that in all these different regions of the world.

We need to trace it back to its source, the CCP, again, that is so highly sensitive to the whole idea of free speech. What if we made it harder and more expensive for the party to control information inside of China? I recently had Matt Pottinger, the former Deputy National Security Advisor, on my podcast.

Mr. Jekielek:
I noticed that Matt Pottinger has endorsed your book.

Mr. Sobolik:
Yes. Matt wrote the foreword which is worth the price of the book. I think the world of Matt and he teases out some of these ideas so eloquently. When I asked him a couple of years back if the U.S. government was doing anything to target the great firewall inside of China, their regime of internet censorship, he said flatly and publicly, “No.” The U.S. government was doing next to nothing, and I’m sure is still doing next to nothing at all. That is a lot of leverage that we’re just leaving on the table.

If the CCP has already telegraphed how concerned they are and how threatened they feel about the nature of speech they cannot control, that’s a sensitive note we need to start pressing on. The virtue of doing that is not only do you maybe marginally increase the ability of the Chinese people to test the boundaries of speech, what you really end up doing strategically is turning the CCP inward. That’s what they’re trying to do to Americans, honestly. Through TikTok and through all this infiltration of our own democracy, they’re trying to make it impossible for us to lead globally.

Mr. Jekielek:
A lot of traffic to the Epoch Times from China comes through firewall busters. There is also some unobstructed traffic from hundreds of thousands of people a month that comes to our Chinese-language websites. There are people that are savvy enough to hop the firewall.

We had this vision that we were going to change China through investment, but it went in the other direction. Someone might say, “Michael, this is a brilliant idea to challenge that censorship regime. But we’ve been growing a censorship regime here. Can we really do this? Is this realistic?”

Mr. Sobolik:
Were we changing China or was the CCP changing America? It’s fair to ask that question because they have so severely infiltrated different aspects of our own civil society. For us to wage a campaign like that and have the national will to win a Cold War, America will need to say with determination, “We’re going to win.” One of Ronald Reagan’s advisors asked him, “What’s your Cold War policy? He said, “It’s simple. We win, they lose.”

After our disastrous pullout from Afghanistan recently and our failure to deter Putin from invading Ukraine, we’ve had some foreign policy failures pile up over the past few years. Americans could be forgiven for
Asking, “Are our leaders capable of winning a Cold War today?”

I’ve been on the Hill and worked very closely with members of Congress and their staff over these past few years. I’ve been in Washington for a decade, and I still believe in America. I have more cynicism, but also a better understanding of how the process actually works. The Covid years in particular tested America in huge ways and we’re still reckoning with some of that. But we would do ourselves such a disservice if we prematurely throw in the towel and say, “We’re no better than they are.”

Mr. Jekielek:
This goes back to our original assertion. TikTok, the most powerful influence tool known to man, is in the hands of the Chinese regime. What better way to demoralize America?

Mr. Sobolik:
The CCP is keying in on that sense of demoralization on both the Left and the Right in America. They play both sides with their ideological information warfare. They are seeking to turn Americans against each other. Everything was so heightened during Covid. I returned to something that Matt Pottinger said in an interview with a different China scholar that I found fascinating.

Matt was asked, “Where is our Sputnik moment?” It’s no mystery what the CCP is. Public opinion of China and America is in the tank. But there hasn’t been this realization, “They’re out to get us.” This interviewer asked Matt, “Where is our Sputnik moment? “Why don’t we feel this umbrage toward everything that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to do to us?” His answer was, “That moment should have been Covid, but Americans just turned against each other instead.”

I wish that moment would have been Covid, because we all know where the virus came from. We know that the CCP cared more about stopping information about the virus than about stopping the virus itself. Americans died. That should be something that we take deep umbrage to.

Moreover, it should have been something that mobilized America to overcome the CCP in a Cold War competition. But I don’t see evidence that we’re there yet. That doesn’t mean we can’t get there, but I wonder if we can do that before a hot war breaks out.

Mr. Jekielek:
That I don’t know. Matt, this has been a great conversation. Your book is excellent and I would encourage our audience to read it. Any final thoughts as we finish up?

Mr. Sobolik:
Writing this book, I became convinced that the world is getting deathly more dangerous than it has been recently. My fear is that Americans are sleepwalking into that dangerous world. Many of our elites think we still live in the 1990s, where history somehow ended, and that we have no trade-offs between economic security and national security. That absolutely isn’t the case now. My fear is that we won’t be able to mobilize a Cold War effort before a war breaks out.

I have such a driving motivation to push this message and to share this book, because I think we still have time to avert that if we’re serious. We do not want to live in a world where Beijing subsumes Taiwan. We don’t want to live in that world. We don’t want to live in a world where the South China Sea moves into a de facto sovereign territory for the PRC. We don’t want to live in a world like that, not just for economic reasons, but for security reasons.

We don’t want to live in a world where American democracy is whittled away by this death of a thousand cuts by our greatest adversary. I see the potential for that world to happen. But there’s still so much we can do, not just to prevent it, but to weaken this regime that would do Americans harm. My hope for anyone who’s listening is that they take stock and take seriously what it means to be an American today.

It’s not a free lunch. The CCP has made it clear that they’re threatened by America and by Americans, which means it’s going to take resolve and some sacrifice for us to win a Cold War. I hope that we find that resolve before it’s too late.

Mr. Jekielek:
Michael Sobolik, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Sobolik:
Thanks for having me, Jan. This was a great conversation.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Michael Sobolik and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.