The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“Bipartisan consensus is rare in Washington. But while politicians today seem eager to draw battle lines around everything, from gas stoves to cars to suburbs, they all seem to agree on one thing: It’s time to get tough on China.
“While many politicians and pundits from across the spectrum are pushing for Congress to ban TikTok, the popular social media app with ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), they’d do better to direct their fury at America’s strict immigration laws, not a platform for viral videos.
“A complex set of formulas caps immigration from China at about 150,000 people per year. For a country with 1.4 billion people, that’s not even a drop in the bucket. Radically increasing or eliminating this limit would do much more to halt China’s rise as a global power than harming American users by banning TikTok. Many young Chinese would jump at the chance to move to the U.S.
“Why would so many Chinese be eager to leave their homes to move thousands of miles away? For starters, the United States is much, much richer. Despite decades of unprecedented economic growth, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is still 80 percent lower than America’s. For all its development and flashy infrastructure projects, China is barely a middle-income country. As of 2022, more than half of the country lives on less than $10 per day, compared to only 3 percent of Americans and about 2 percent of Europeans.
“Further, China has a repressive, authoritarian government. Despite China’s harsh penalties for dissent, many of its citizens have taken to the streets in recent months to speak out against state oppression. This suggests that many Chinese, especially young and educated ones, are unhappy with the Communist regime.
“On top of that, only 7 percent of Chinese citizens are members of its ruling CCP. The party has made membership a highly competitive and coveted necessity for those wishing to advance in Chinese business or government. That leaves 93 percent of Chinese citizens without access to the country’s biggest source of money, power, and influence. For these people especially, America offers for opportunity for advancement. , . . If just 1 percent of China’s working-age population took the chance to escape, the nation would lose nearly 10 million people.
“China already faces a demographic crisis. Its population is aging and now declining, with its social safety net increasingly strained. The CCP, long reliant on economic growth for its legitimacy, faces the possibility that China will grow old before it grows rich. Bright young people drive economic growth in any nation. Their exodus would doom China to languish in economic and demographic turmoil.” — Want to Beat China? Let in More Chinese!, Kraz Greinetz, Reason, 3/13/23 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: Kraz Greinetz thinks that we should be “radically increasing” Chinese immigration from the current annual level of 150,000. And just how radically high might that be? A figure Greinetz throws out is ten million Chinese—with maybe lots more to follow. This, the writer tells us, would be a good way to drain the best brains of China for our benefit. But that number, as the author admits, would only be one percent of China’s total population. That percentage wouldn’t make much of a dent in China’s intelligence.
But what effect would 10 million Chinese have on America if they arrived within a short period of time? It wouldn’t be a good one, even if most of them were fairly bright. To appreciate the magnitude of such a number, consider that only ten states in our union have populations higher than 10 million, and of those ten states, six have around 13 million or less.
Ten million Chinese would be an enormous challenge to assimilation, particularly today when assimilation is no longer in fashion thanks to the cults of multiculturalism and critical race theory. Most Chinese aren’t Communist Party members, but this doesn’t mean—if they came here—that they would immediately grasp the principles and practices that sustain American freedom. More confusion of values is the last thing our increasingly disunited country needs now.
China has its problems to be sure, but it’s likely that China still will remain Chinese with a shared culture and common goals. China’s leaders have the common sense to know that diversity isn’t strength when it becomes divisive. Unfortunately, most of our leaders don’t possess this basic sense. Their failure won’t bode well for us as we compete and contend with a united China.