Will Washington finally speak out on China?

OPINION:

After America’s attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, China has taken a predictable stance against the United States. The Chinese Communist Party is backing Tehran’s Islamic regime while condemning the U.S. and Israel.

Beijing’s hostility toward America extends well beyond foreign policy. China is targeting us directly, across multiple fronts, with increasing aggression. Two Chinese nationals were recently arrested on charges of smuggling a dangerous pathogen into the U.S. One of them, a CCP member, reportedly received Chinese government funding to conduct research on the pathogen, which poses a serious threat to humans and livestock.

The House Select Committee on the CCP is trying to investigate the matter, but this is an exception in Washington, not the rule. Even more dangerous than China’s provocations is America’s complacency or, worse, complicity.

Consider the University of Pennsylvania, home to the Penn Biden Center. Between Joseph R. Biden’s tenure as vice president and president, the university received at least $61 million from Chinese sources. After the Penn Biden Center (managed by former Secretary of State Antony Blinken) was announced in 2017, Chinese donations to the university more than tripled and included gifts linked to the CCP.

What exactly were they buying?

The refusal to call attention to America’s chief adversary is a bipartisan issue. I recently wrote in these pages that the massive Chinese company Nongfu Spring — owned by the richest man in China, Zhong Shanshan — purchased a commercial site in Nashua for $67 million. That is more than four times the site’s assessed value ($15 million). The site was obviously worth more to the Chinese than it was to your typical purchaser.

Why the premium? The facility has rights to draw millions of gallons of water from a local utility while sited just miles from sensitive infrastructure: Nashua Airport, several defense facilities and a Federal Aviation Administration control center.

Yet not a single member of New Hampshire’s congressional delegation has addressed it. The deal’s accelerated closing on Jan. 31 coincided with the transition period from the Biden to the Trump administration, when the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States was not in business.

Since then, Nongfu Spring has been aggressively hiring in the U.S., eyeing nationwide access to our water supply. As New Hampshire State Sen. Kevin Avard recently noted, the silence around this deal is deafening. Lily Tang Williams, a former Chinese national now running for Congress, has rightly called this a part of “soft power invasion.”

They are not wrong. Just a few miles from the Nongfu site, a Chinese investor bought the shuttered 50-acre campus of Daniel Webster College and paid double its market value. The property sits empty, off the market, and its future is unclear.

Through microchips, farmland, food production and Hollywood studios, China has steadily bought its way into thousands of American businesses, infrastructure and public policy. The CCP is not hiding its ambitions; it is executing them.

The CCP even seeks to affect our culture through American youth education. Three years ago, the CCP announced plans to rebrand its pro-communist Confucius Institutes at U.S. schools, managing China’s image in the eyes of impressionable students. From 2012 to 2024, nearly 200 American colleges and universities held contracts with Chinese businesses. The Wall Street Journal tracked thousands of contracts valued in the billions of dollars.

According to even more recent data, the Chinese funding of U.S. colleges and universities has increased exponentially in the past four years, surpassing $2.3 billion since 2021. China is now the single largest source of overseas donations to Harvard, Columbia and Stanford. This backs up Chinese President Xi’s promise to exercise even more “soft power.”

When a NewsNation investigator asked Nongfu Spring to comment on the Nashua deal, the company did not respond. What’s worse is that our leaders also decline to comment.

• Rick Berman serves as president of RBB Strategies.