From covering up the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic to using dangerous apps like TikTok to compromise Americans’ personal information, the Chinese Communist Party has long cloaked its nefarious activities in secrecy.
As a new report from The Heritage Foundation assesses, China’s lack of transparency is part of a larger strategy to deceive its adversaries. Based on data pulled together from various sources, the report exposes many things China has gone to great lengths to hide, including its inhumane practices in Xinjiang, its influence operations to distort global media, and the unreported millions of Chinese citizens who likely died from COVID-19 within its borders. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
The 2024 China Transparency Report assesses the current state of the People’s Republic of China’s transparency on eight key issues: its economy, energy and the environment, human rights, influence operations, the military, outbound investment into other nations, politics and law, and technology.
In each section, the report reviews the data China makes publicly available—the information China wants the world to know. But that data alone does not tell the full story. To get a better understanding of what is really happening, the report surveys nearly 100 private and nongovernmental databases, reports, and researchers that shed light on the reality in China.
The report includes many eye-popping statistics. For example, despite publicly claiming to be adopting environmentally friendly policies, China is rapidly adding to its already existing 1,100 coal plants, while the U.S. has fewer than 250. And while China reports an annual defense budget of around $225 billion, the true figure is likely to exceed $700 billion.
The report also includes essays from distinguished experts that dive deeper into subjects such as human rights, the U.S. defense industrial base, influence operations in the Pacific, Wall Street financing, COVID-19 cover-ups, and Chinese inner-circle politics.
For example, Dr. Adrian Zenz, the world’s leading expert exposing China’s genocide against the Muslim Uyghur population in Xinjiang, offers new evidence examining China’s mass internment and birth prevention measures. Using classified internal state documents from the Chinese Communist Party, Zenz shows that Beijing is fully intent on targeting the Uyghurs for genocide, finding that the Communist Party enacted measures, such as female sterilization, to prevent the births of up to 2.6 million children because they didn’t belong to China’s dominant ethnic group (the Han).
In another essay, Dr. George Calhoun, the director of the Hanlon Financial Systems Center at the Stevens Institute of Technology, uses China’s own data to expose its systematic suppression of COVID-19-related information and assesses the true impact COVID-19 had within China.
While the official Chinese statistics pegged the official COVID-19 death toll at around 90,000 people by the spring of 2022, Calhoun concludes: “The number of Chinese killed by COVID is believed to be between 1.5 and 2 million, with estimates ranging up to 3.5 million at the high end, underscoring how the Chinese government’s efforts to cover up the virus outbreak and suppress vital information about the disease have imposed terrible costs, not just on the rest of the world, but its own citizens as well.”
For the United States to win the New Cold War against the Chinese Communist Party, it must have access to accurate data and resources. As Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, notes in the report’s preface:
In honor of President Reagan’s legacy, the 2024 China Transparency Report equips our leaders to both shine a light on and bring the heat to the [Chinese Communist Party]. As he famously said, ‘When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.’ The American people take the threat from China deadly seriously; it’s time for our leadership to do the same.
Heritage’s 2024 China Transparency Report, found here, will help lead the way in exposing the truth about the Chinese Communist Party and the consequences of its authoritarian rule and the secrecy and deception it practices with the rest of the world. Armed with credible, in-depth, and transparent data on China, America’s policymakers can ensure they know as precisely as possible the nature of this adversary they must confront.
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