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China’s influence over the film industry is booming, with the help of companies like Disney. Republican Senator Tom Cotton is aware of this, which is why he is currently pushing one of the most aggressive bills against Xi Jinping’s regime.
Cotton’s proposed legislation seeks to allow American studios to make content free of influence from the Communist Party of China. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK) introduced his Beat China initiative, which also proposed protecting movie studios from communist censorship.
The plan outlines the senator’s major effort to separate American businesses from Beijing, focusing on telecommunications, semiconductors, the medical field and other industries.
“This evil empire spies on and preys on Americans, locks innocents in concentration camps, uses forced labor to build its factories, and denies the most basic freedoms to its more than 1.4 billion citizens,” the senator said in his keynote address at the Reagan Institute.
“We need to defeat this evil empire and consign the Chinese Communists, like the Bolsheviks, to the ash heap of history,” he added.
“Communist China has more money, people, & power than the Soviet Union ever did. We’re also more connected economically. Our first task is to decouple our economies so CCP can’t exploit these connections by stealing tech & cutting off essential supplies,” Tom Cotton said on Twitter.
El senador republicano también advierte que su plan para sanear la economía americana de la influencia del Partido Comunista podría afectar en el corto plazo a USA. «Los costos del desacoplamiento específico con China palidecen en comparación con los costos de la pasividad», dijo Cotton.
The Republican senator also warns that his plan to clean the U.S. economy from Communist Party influence could hurt the U.S. in the short term. “The costs of targeted decoupling with China pale in comparison to the costs of passivity,” Cotton said.
Cotton believes that as such, “the federal government should ban Chinese investment in U.S. studios and broadcast services. Entertainment companies,” the Republican says, “should divest from Chinese sources and dissolve existing joint ventures. The government should also ban Chinese investment in platforms that show movies and TV shows in the country, such as movie companies and cable and broadcast TV providers.”
Cotton proposes several ways to separate the economies of the two countries. One is to sanction senior members of the Chinese regime and apply strategic sanctions to China’s industrial sector that benefits from the constant and recurring theft of American intellectual property. Cotton assures that this measure will make the Chinese regime think twice before forcing American companies to hand over valuable trade secrets before entering the Chinese market or carrying out cyber-attacks on American companies.
Another of the measures proposed by the Republican senator is to toughen trade with China in sectors and products that could facilitate the conquest of Xi Jinping’s regime. The measure would close the escape valve for American technology that could be exploited by Chinese military or commercial companies.
The Beat China project also proposes to centralize decisions regarding China in the State Department. Thus, the control of the traffic of these products and information will be able to prevent sectors such as 5G technology, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing from not reaching the hands of the Communist Party.
How to keep the American economy on its feet, according to Tom Cotton
The decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies will have negative effects, according to what Cotton highlighted in his project. However, he offers a more or less worked out vision to keep the national economy going.
Cotton proposes “opening new markets to American products and negotiating high-level bilateral trade agreements that prioritize American jobs and exports.” The closure to the Chinese market will require new places where American products can be purchased.
In this way, the senator argues, the new trade exchanges will reinforce the U.S.’s geopolitical advance, decoupling the economies of these countries from the Chinese regime and exerting a front of opposition to it.
“The message should finally be clear: if you steal from Americans once, you’ll be looking over your shoulder forever,” said Tom Cotton to the Reagan Institute.
Cotton, therefore, insists on the need to “reclaim international institutions and regulatory bodies from Chinese influence whenever possible, and to establish new groups composed of American partners when existing institutions cannot be reclaimed.”
He also pointed out that the World Trade Organization has been inept in preventing China’s commercial conquest. In this sense, he asserted that there is no point in reforming these institutions.
“The U.S. must realize that culture and information are battlegrounds in the competition with China,” read Beat China. “To that end, U.S. must ensure that Hollywood can produce its content free from malicious foreign influences and that the Chinese Communist Party has no control over what Americans can see,” it added.
Rafael Valera, Venezuelan, student of Political Science, political exile in São Paulo, Brazil since 2017 // Rafael Valera, venezolano, es estudiante de Ciencias Políticas y exiliado político en São Paulo, Brasil desde 2017