CARL QUINTANILLA: China’s President Xi taking a hard line against foreign interference. In a speech marking the Chinese Communist Party’s 100th anniversary, he said China, quote, “won’t allow any foreign force to bully or oppress the country,” adding anyone who cares try to do that will have “their heads bashed bloody against the Great Wall of Steel.”
LAURA JARRETT: “A Great Wall of Steel.” It’s a warning call from Chinese president Xi Jinping.
STUART VARNEY: Xi Jinping at the 100th anniversary at the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. He’s aiming at America.
BECKY QUICK: “China won’t be bullied, and it won’t be lectured.”
EUNICE YOON: President Xi says that any foreign force would, quote, “find themselves on a collision course with a Great Wall of Steel.”
JIM CRAMER: The hundredth anniversary of the party and basically saying number-one goal, get Taiwan to be back as a Chinese province. We cannot afford that to happen, and I hope that there’s a response.
BUCK: Welcome back to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. I’m Buck Sexton, and I gotta tell you, one of the lasting legacies of the Trump administration was the change in the national conversation around China and what’s really going on with them on all fronts — trade, military, and intelligence ambitions — and just that the Chinese Communist Party is seeking to supplant the United States as the global hegemon.
Today, you have the hundred-year anniversary celebration, and you heard some of the kind of rhetoric that is coming not from just Chinese state media — which is also often very inflammatory and very aggressive. I mean, here is… This is through a translator, obviously. This is the Chinese premier Xi Jinping specifically speaking about the United States and anybody out there who may try to “bully” the Chinese people. Play 14.
XI JINPING (via translator): At the same time, the Chinese people will never allow ourselves to be bullied, oppressed, or enslaved by any foreign powers. Anyone who dares to try will find their heads bashed bloody against a Great Wall of Steel, forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.
BUCK: “Heads bashed bloody.” There’s some background here about Xi Jinping that I always think people should know when you’re talking about the premier of what is clearly the second most powerful country in the world. He was, in many ways, a victim of the Cultural Revolution, of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
And he’s somebody who still very much remembers what that was like. His half-sister was persecuted to the point where she took her own life. This was during the Cultural Revolution period, and the guy that you just heard — the premier of China right now, 1.4 billion people. He had to flee, and he was among the exiles who were youths, who had to take to the countryside in the Mao era.
He lived, Clay, for a while in a cave to try to avoid the Red Guards of the Chinese Communist Party and their purges and their violence in order to try to secure power. This is in living memory these things were happening. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the Great Famine.
I mean, “great,” of course, you’re just talking about the scope and scale of these things. Millions and millions of people were killed in the famine. They estimate up to 20 to 40 million, depending on whose numbers you believe. And this is now the second most powerful country in the world, Clay. And they’ve got ambitions.
I think you’re right, Buck, when you say that the lasting legacy of Trump is going to be in many ways his relationship with China and the fact that the Biden administration, on some level, has basically tried to continue everything that Trump did about China.
Trump came along us with us Tuesday, Buck, and pointed out, “Hey, they’re still keeping the tariffs.” They are trying in some way to stand up to China. And, to me, this speech is just further evidence, as if we needed it at all, that we are in a modern-day Cold War that is more significant than the one that we were allied against in the 1980s with the Soviet Union.
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