Congressman Rick Crawford interviewed on Conduit News with Paul Harrell about the growing danger of China’s economic influence around the world. Crawford’s comments were in addition to a recent op ed on Talk Business and Politics entitled “Do we want China to slow down or stop?”. In the interview he shares concerns about China disregarding World Trade Organization rules and argues against nations doing business with China under the guise of “economic development”.
They’ll promise you the moon…nations in western Africa as an example will come in here and [say] we’ll make infrastructure improvement. We’ll give you 5G and you guys will be on the road to economic prosperity and we’re going to create all kinds of jobs…So what they do is they’ll come in and maybe in the end the payoff is they get access to those rare earth minerals that you see countries in Africa have abundance of and guess who gets rich? Probably that corrupt leader of the nation in question. Then the Chinese come in and they’ll fain some sort of a project. But look, they’re not creating jobs. They’re bringing Chinese people in to fill those jobs. It essentially is a closed loop…So all this is just a sham… They’re very aggressive in Cuba right now to say nothing of what they do here in the United States and then their ability to influence through their soft media push. For example they go to the Ag [agriculture] media of all things and they place op eds. They put stories in publications that talk about how Trump is failing the American farmer and the soybean tariffs are punitive and he [Trump] doesn’t care about farmers and all this other kind of stuff and that’s their media influence campaign they’re engaged in. These are not people who are interested in any kind of mutually beneficial relationship between us and them. They are all about China and advancing their own economic and military agenda. – Congressman Rick Crawford
Crawford continued by making a distinction between purported “Chinese companies” and the “Chinese government”.
When we have all these Chinese companies or the Chinese government, there are no Chinese companies. They are state-owned enterprises. They are agents of the Chinese government for lack of a better term. They come in and they promise economic development. That sounds good and it particularly sounds good to a region or a district like mine. The Delta region, that really needs a shot in the arm with regard to economic development. So people get all charged up about the idea that “oh awesome. We’re going to have a factory or a plant in a place that really needs an infusion of jobs and economic advancement” and that sounds really good but I’m going to tell you that is a Trojan horse…and we need to be very very careful about welcoming these people, this Chinese government plan to threaten the US economy… – Congressman Rick Crawford
Congressman Crawford is a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Watch the entire interview below.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP9jmTkCfYw[/embedyt]
