A lawmaker who has been “sanctioned” by China is responding with a warning to the communist regime: “Just wait.”
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., was one of 11 U.S. officials targeted by the Chinese Communist Party recently.
He explained in a commentary at FoxNews.com that the 11 supposedly were “behav[ing] badly on Hong Kong-related issues.”
The sanctions won’t affect him, Cotton wrote, because they never were about him or his actions.
“They’re meant to scare potential critics of the Chinese Communist Party into shameful silence and even complicity. The message is clear: the party is always watching and ready to punish its enemies,” he wrote.
He pointed out that such scare tactics silence “even powerful people.”
“That’s why you won’t see supposedly ‘progressive’ executives and superstars in the NBA denouncing China’s forced labor and other human-rights abuses,” he wrote, noting the league’s financial ties with China.
Others, he said, are not so “craven.”
“We’ll never stop fighting to defend the many victims of Chinese Communism,” he said.
The victims include Jimmy Lai, a pro-democracy media entrepreneur in Hong Kong who was arrested recently.
“Lai and the journalists at his publication, Apply Daily, reported honestly on the CCP’s takeover of the city, under the pretext of national security. Now they’re paying the price, as the CCP locks them up alongside countless other political prisoners,” Cotton wrote.
Other victims are the Uighurs in Xinjiang, “who’ve been herded into concentration camps for ‘re-education’ and subjected to forced sterilization and abortions in order to suppress minority birthrates.”
Also, he said, “the CCP’s victims include hundreds of thousands of dead Americans who overdosed on fentanyl made in loosely regulated Chinese superlabs; their fatal doses, and the grief of their loved ones, can be traced back to China and its cynical leaders who allow these drug rings and the carnage they cause to continue.”
And not forgotten are the hundreds of thousands of Americans “who’ve suffered and died from the Wuhan virus that it unleashed on the world after a massive coverup. And they include the millions of workers who were laid off after their factories shut down, either because they were moving to China or because they were bankrupted by China’s predatory trade practices and technology theft.”
The CCP ultimately wants to crush competitors and tyrannize globally, he said.
“That’s why the party is lashing out now to suppress its critics. But these scare tactics are doomed to fail. The CCP’s crimes are too great, and the friends of freedom too many, to be suppressed for long.
“If the Chinese Communists think we’ve ‘behaved badly’ so far by opposing their tyranny, I have two words for them: just wait,” Cotton wrote.
