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 ” and boosted Chinese companies with subsidies and export tax rebates. Meanwhile, the PRC has systematically preyed on American companies. American firms face well-known obstacles in China’s health market, including drug approval delays, unfair pricing limitations, IP theft, and counterfeiting. Chinese nationals working as employees at pharma companies have been caught stealing trade secrets both in America and in China. And the CCP has long engaged in cyber-espionage and hacking of U.S. academic medical centers and healthcare companies.

In fact, PRC-linked hackers have targeted American universities and firms in a bid to steal IP related to coronavirus treatments and vaccines, sometimes disrupting the work of our researchers. Having been caught covering up the coronavirus outbreak, Beijing is desperate for a public relations coup, and may hope that it will be able to claim credit for any medical breakthroughs.

As all of these examples should make clear, the ultimate ambition of China’s rulers isn’t to trade with the United States. It is to raid the United States. If you are an American business leader, appeasing the PRC may bring short-term rewards. But in the end, the PRC’s goal is to replace you. As a U.S. Chamber of Commerce report put it, “[t]he belief by foreign companies that large financial investments, the sharing of expertise and significant technology transfers would lead to an ever opening China market is being replaced by boardroom banter that win-win in China means China wins twice.”

Although Americans hoped that trade and investment would liberalize China’s political system, the fundamental character of the regime has never changed. As its ruthless crackdown of Hong Kong demonstrates once again, China is no closer to democracy today than it was in 1989 when tanks confronted pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. It remains an authoritarian, one-party state in which the Chinese Communist Party wields absolute power, unchecked by popular elections, the rule of law, or an independent judiciary. The CCP surveils its own people and assigns them social credit scores, employs