What's Coming to Mesquite

"Wray and other government officials are testifying in front of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party for a hearing titled 'The Chinese Community Party Cyber Threat to the American Homeland and National Security.'

'There has been far too little public focus on the fact that PRC [People’s Republic of China] hackers are targeting our critical infrastructure – our water treatment plants, our electrical grid, our oil and natural gas pipelines, our transportation systems.'"

 "Chinese law requires any organization with three or more CCP members to set up a party cell... there are likely few well-known companies operating in China to which this requirement doesn’t apply... Xi Jinping’s government has pushed, since at least 2016, more subsidiaries of foreign companies to comply. In 2018, it started requiring all companies publicly listed in China—including foreign joint ventures—to establish party cells."

 "Former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told lawmakers that a proposed electric vehicle battery plant in Michigan could be used for Chinese espionage. 

 'I don't think there's any question that they're going to take advantage of that situation... that's just the way they operate. They'll establish a manufacturing unit, they'll establish whatever they can, and then they will use that for their own intelligence purposes.'" 

"At a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday, stakeholders claimed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was using soft power to sway U.S. institutions—including some private schools as well as public schools—posing a national security threat."

 "The FBI is investigating an unauthorized “police station” that China is running out of New York as part of a global network of such outposts, FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday, vowing to put a stop to Beijing’s law enforcement activity in the United States." 

 "The Chinese spy balloon that flew across the U.S. was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to block it from doing so, according to two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official."

 "For the first time, the world's largest film market is not the United States, but China. The pandemic sped up a trend that was already years in the making. It has also brought out the Chinese government's growing influence over these films' content, which has Congress members worried."

"China is fueling the fentanyl crisis in the U.S. by directly subsidizing the manufacturing of materials that are used by traffickers to make the drug outside the country, according to a report released Tuesday by a special House Committee focused on countering the Chinese government."

 "The [Chinese Communist Party] hides behind the veil of soft diplomacy and mutual benefit until its foreign partners exhibit political nonconformity," Blackburn's office told FOX Business, adding that sister cities are "similar to Confucius Institutes," or partnerships between the CCP and U.S. public education institutions, that "may leave American communities vulnerable to foreign espionage and ideological coercion." 

"Case in point, until very recently Canadian Solar — a nominally Canadian but decidedly Chinese company — was not being detained at all. This is in spite of Canadian Solar admitting in its Securities and Exchange Commission filings “solar modules imported into the U.S. contain polysilicon sourced from the Inner Mongolia, Hubei and Shaanxi provinces of China.”

 “China has long used its legal and regulatory system to steal intellectual property, and we have seen this in everything from semiconductors to seeds, not to mention the scale and sophistication by which China can manipulate critical infrastructure as exposed vulnerabilities in American technologies... this interference has ranged from data breaches and theft of agricultural research to ramping up disruptions of irrigation and transportation systems.”