Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said Friday said America has to “stop being naive” about China, warning that the communist country has “a full strategy in place” to cement itself as dominant world superpower.
In an interview on Newsmax TV’s “Greg Kelly Reports,” Haley said that in her U.N. role, “I saw how they work. They absolutely know what they’re doing.”
“We have to stop being naive thinking that they're going to become more democratic if we’re nice to them,” she said. “That's not going to happen. It's a communist regime, they want to be communist.
“They have a full strategy in place and that strategy is they're building up their military. ... They're stealing $50 billion or more of intellectual property from us a year. They want to become a surveillance state."
She added that China invests “all over the world” with a purpose: to run up the debt of a country. In this fashion, she said, "they can turn around and say, ‘Give us your utilities, we want to put in military installations.’
“And more than that, the most important thing President XI [Jinping] is saying [is] that anyone that comes and does business in China has to work with the Chinese military,” she said.
At the moment, many are looking at the role China played in spawning the outbreak and the concealing it in its early stage. The White House has strongly suggested that a virology lab in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began, may have allowed the dangerous coronavirus to escape into the world. Officials have said they have evidence supporting this theory, though China emphatically denies it.
Others have pointed to Chinese "wet markets," and the consumption of exotic animals bought there, like bats, as the spark in the coronavirus outbreak.
According to Haley, the question of where and how the coronavirus developed is irrelevant when you look at China’s behavior during the outbreak.
“Regardless of whether you think it was in a lab or what do you think it happened from a wet market … they knew it was there,” she said of the virus that has swept around the world, killing tens of thousands and fueling lockdowns that have struck hard at many national economies.
“Do you know what they did? They basically went and hoarded all of the medical equipment, and wouldn't even allow American companies to export it out because they wanted to save it for themselves so that they could use it as leverage with other countries,” she charged. “They wanted other countries to suffer if they were going to have to suffer.”
At the very same time, she said, China has pursued baldly aggressive policies on multiple other fronts. “China has been arresting Hong Kong protesters. ... They have been testing nuclear weapons against the nuclear weapons ban.”
“That's what China's been focused on. We need to start being smart about it,” she declared.
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