China’s American political mercenaries

The startlingly different views of the future direction of the U.S. and China could not be starker. The direction boils down to those who want to make money with the Chinese Communist Party regardless of the consequences and those who want to defend against Beijing’s whole-of-society espionage and subversion.

Veteran business leader Maurice R. Greenberg, who has been allied with the Chinese Communist Party, also known as CCP, for decades, encapsulated the first view in a recent Wall Street Journal commentary. He announced a new organization to improve the relationship between Americans and the CCP. Mr. Greenberg argues that business leaders in the two countries can help bridge the vast chasms that strain current bilateral tensions.

To Greenberg and his supporters, the tensions are merely economic issues to be resolved in a businesslike way. The reputable-looking group includes former U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue and former Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

Their polar opposites appeared in a historic joint news conference in early July. FBI Director Christopher Wray and British Domestic Intelligence (MI5) chief Ken McCallum took the unprecedented step of appearing together to warn business leaders about the CCP’s threat to free enterprise. Mr. Wray and Mr. McCallum described the full scope of dangers that American and British companies face from the CCP. They stressed that the CCP will use any and every tool it can to steal technology and intellectual property. The CCP uses everything from massive state-sponsored hacking to planting spies in Western companies and research institutes to steal corporate secrets.

The CCP, the FBI and MI5 leaders warned, does not want to compete with Western companies. It wants to destroy them.

Other Wall Street Journal coverage highlighted the CCP’s ongoing overt and covert operations to influence local and state governments and policies across the United States. The U.S. Counterintelligence Center issued the warning of aggressive CCP lobbying of policymakers and leveraging trade and investment efforts to reward or punish national, state and local government institutions based on their policies.

With the sharp decline in public trust in the FBI, many Americans are skeptical of the bureau’s leadership.

The business is an old one that has worked time and again. Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Donohue are poster boys for the CCP. In his commentary, Mr. Greenberg articulates the massive increase in bilateral trade made possible by China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

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