Newsom poses for would-be presidential photo ops with Chinese communists and naively ignores their terrible record. Now REP MIKE GALLAGHER says what Gavin won’t say… This is how Beijing is polluting the planet, stealing from the US and enslaving millions of people

Congressman Mike Gallagher is Chairman of the Select Committee for the Chinese Communist Party

“Divorce is not an option,” tweeted Gavin Newsom’s official account as California’s governor roamed China preaching the gospel of climate change.

Many D-words have been used to describe the evolving U.S.-China relationship — decoupling, decoupling, diversification, disentanglement — but Newsom’s marriage metaphor was new.

Perhaps Newsom was thinking about marriage because Xi Jinping treated him to a weeklong honeymoon, clearly aligned with Newsom’s presidential aspirations and eager for a relationship with a younger, naive administration.

I have criticized President Biden’s diplomatic accommodation of Beijing, but Newsom’s blatant foreign display makes Biden’s foreign policy look like Bismark-level realpolitik.

To believe that the Communist Party of China (CCP) could be a trusted partner on environmental issues is, as Oscar Wilde said about second marriages, the triumph of hope over experience.

Let’s look at the CCP’s environmental performance: According to the World Bank, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is responsible for 33% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, more than all developed countries combined.

And while the United States and Europe are cutting carbon emissions, emissions in China continue to skyrocket, with a 10% increase between 2022 and 2023 alone.

Last year the CCP opened an average of two new coal-fired power plants per week, which is six times more than the rest of the world combined, and in the past year alone China has approved more coal-fired power plant capacity than exists in mainland Europe.

No wonder that air pollution in China causes as many as two million deaths per year, according to the WHO.

Congressman Mike Gallagher (above) is chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party

The CCP is also destroying the oceans and subsidizing fishing fleets in distant waters estimated to be ten to a hundred times the size of the US and European fleets combined.

These fleets descend on foreign seas like hordes of locusts, fishing illegally and effectively mining the world’s oceans. Largely due to the CCP’s predatory fishing practices, 90% of the world’s fisheries have been fully exploited or depleted.

On land, the picture is just as bleak.

The Chinese government itself estimates that 80% of China’s groundwater is contaminated and that a similar percentage of major river basins are ‘unsafe for human contact’. And there are good reasons to believe that Chinese companies are applying similar environmental standards, or lack thereof, to mining projects in places like South America.

But whether it’s the fishing boats destroying the oceans, the dangerous mines ruining the land, or the factories processing the products of both, the secret ingredient underlying the CCP’s industrial-scale environmental destruction is the most extensive system of forced labor since Stalin’s gulags.

Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang are hired out as de facto slaves, providing an easy source of forced labor for both the PRC and multinational companies.

Uighurs have been forced to process seafood for export and produce batteries that power electric vehicles. They are a key cog in the supply chain of ‘fast fashion’, mass-produced counterfeit clothing, which fills landfills, produces 10% of global greenhouse gases and dumps more than 70,000 tonnes of waste into China’s rivers every year, accounting for half of the world’s global total of the fashion industry.

In 2020, two Indonesian survivors of a tour aboard a tuna fishing vessel from the People’s Republic of China described being “treated like animals,” with the bodies of four crew members thrown overboard after they died from abuse.

Last year the CCP opened an average of two new coal-fired power plants per week, which is six times more than the rest of the world combined, and in the past year alone China has approved more coal-fired power plant capacity than exists in mainland Europe. (Above) Smoke billows from the chimneys of a coal-fired power plant in China’s Shanxi province

Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang are hired out as de facto slaves, providing an easy source of forced labor for both the PRC and multinational companies. (Above) A watchtower and barbed wire fences are seen around a manufacturing facility in western China’s Xinjiang region

I have criticized President Biden’s diplomatic accommodation of Beijing, but Newsom’s blatant foreign display makes Biden’s foreign policy look like Bismark-level realpolitik. (Above) Newsom shakes hands with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during a meeting in Beijing on October 25, 2023

“Working conditions” in the CCP’s mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo are “like those of slavery,” according to the testimony of a worker’s lawyer, with children as young as eight years old being forced into narrow shafts where many will spend their entire lives.

Governor Newsom did not see fit to raise these human rights violations with Xi Jinping at their meeting, not to mention the broader ongoing genocide in Xinjiang and the cultural genocide unfolding in Tibet.

When a reporter challenged him afterward, Newsom quipped lightheartedly, “I can’t be everything to everyone, every moment of every minute of every day.” In other words, he was happy to play the role of supplicant in exchange for his treatment as a would-be head of a so-called vassal state.

Victims of the CCP’s cynical game also include American workers who have seen our once-promising renewable industries crushed under the weight of massive Chinese government subsidies combined with the theft of intellectual property.

Today, Beijing produces 85% of the world’s solar cells, and 97% of wafers, the silicon squares that are put together to make solar panels. And now that the CCP has used illegal methods to control the global solar energy market, it is poised to repeat the feat when it comes to electric vehicles.

Governor Newsom must recognize that if he really wants to protect the environment and not just further his presidential ambitions, working with the CCP is like a firefighter working with an arsonist. (Above) Newsom at the Great Wall on October 26, 2023

In 2021, China had 79% of the world’s production capacity of lithium batteries, which are essential for electric cars.

State-sponsored CCP monopolies force foreign companies into partnerships to both steal their intellectual property and make them complicit in human rights abuses.

Governor Newsom must recognize that if he really wants to protect the environment and not just further his presidential ambitions, working with the CCP is like a firefighter working with an arsonist.

The United States must build its own batteries, its own solar panels, and its own supply chains to support it. We must remove regulatory barriers to the development of alternative sources of lithium and rare earth minerals on our own soil and that of our allies.

Global Times, a CCP propaganda outlet, praised Newsom as “a friend from afar,” while Newsom stated, “(our shared humanity) is what should drive us to work together to defeat the greatest existential threat our planet has ever known.” fuses.’

That may be true, but not in the way Newsom intended.

When it comes to protecting the planet, the CCP is not part of the solution.

The CCP is the threat itself.