In the last few weeks, the world has been on a roller coaster ride over President Donald Trump’s proposals to massively increase tariffs.
Whether by intention or not, American trade policies now stand in an interesting place. Trump has paused America’s largest tariffs increases on virtually every country, save one: China. On China, the Trump administration announced Thursday that it will now apply a 145% tariff, an amount that seems to be climbing by the minute.
Who knows where this ride will end, but it very much appears that the U.S. economic decoupling from China is beginning in earnest, and not a moment too soon.
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While the trade debate continues, an explosive hearing on Wednesday with a Facebook whistleblower highlighted why wholly changing our relationship with China needs to be a priority.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, who worked at Facebook, now Meta, from 2011 to 2017, came before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism and said that the company repeatedly undermined “U.S. national security” and betrayed American values.
The former Facebook executive said that despite claims otherwise, Meta currently operates in China.
She testified that Facebook initially pitched its cooperation as a way to “help China increase global influence and promote the China Dream.”
Here’s Wynn-Williams telling Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., about how Facebook handed over user data to China to gain access to the lucrative Chinese market.
Among the benefits given to China was access to Meta’s artificial intelligence model called “Llama,” which was used to create the highly advanced AI used by DeepSeek, a Chinese company.
She said that Facebook worked “hand in glove” with the Chinese government to censor anti-Chinese Communist Party posts on its platforms.
Consider this when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now says that he loves free speech and that the mean old Biden administration made him censor Americans. Many American companies will be more than happy to adopt censorship in an authoritarian country that has no intention of protecting rights of any kind.
Meta has denied the allegations and has said that it doesn’t currently operate in China. However, the hearing revealed something important when we consider the larger debate about Trump’s “trade war.”
To work with China—which, despite its entry into the international trade system, remains a communist country—requires a certain amount of sacrifice of American values to begin with. It’s often a large sacrifice.
Whether that means accepting dirt-cheap goods made by workers in near-slave conditions or looking the other way when the regime puts certain ethnic groups into concentration camps or by taking that next step of helping the Communist Chinese regime censor speech to continue doing business in their country, there can be no doubt that we are engaging with a cultural and political system sharply at odds with Western ideals.
Oh, and let’s not forget the COVID-19 thing that the whole world continues to pay a massive, incalculable price for.
As China becomes more and more powerful, in large part due to decisions made by our own leaders, Americans and people across the world will increasingly be forced to do things at the behest of the Chinese government.
It’s become clear that liberalizing relations between China and the West has not led to more freedom. It’s simply allowed China to create more sophisticated tools for tyranny.
Consider for a moment that while Americans have freely debated in recent weeks the value of tariffs (often quite hysterically I must say), in China, government censors outright forbid any discussion about the scale of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese exports.
Worse than China getting better at censoring its own people is its export of censorship techniques around the globe. It isn’t becoming more like us. It is getting rich while we become more like it.
What’s becoming clear to anyone with common sense is that we are now in a serious competition with China over how the world will operate. It’s a contest between two great powers. What Trump appears to be doing is carving out a distinctly American-led trade system to stand in opposition.
What Trump is doing is the exact opposite of the Biden administration, which adopted a dead reckoning approach leading straight toward cultural, economic, and geopolitical oblivion. It spent its time in ascendent power prosecuting political enemies and pummeling the American people to accept its nouveau racist ideas.
Meanwhile, the United States wandered aimlessly toward either a global war or long-term twilight vassalage under an ascendent Middle Kingdom. Maybe both, as Vice President JD Vance noted on X.
The current trade disruption is a rejection of shameful and un-American kowtowing to a communist regime. It is a rejection of the equally odious acceptance of Chinese-style regulation of thought and speech that Western government, corporate, and educational elites have so eagerly glommed onto. It’s a rejection of a future in which China’s dominance is simply treated as a fact of life.
We can’t trust corporate America or Big Tech to simply reject China’s way of things. We need a reset at a national level.
If we want to avoid a terrible conflict with China that we may soon not be able to win, then we have to change the way we’ve done business with it for far too long. Our allies, if they really are our allies, will have to change as well. Trump seems to understand that. His trade gamesmanship may very well be a painful but necessary path out of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves.
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