One fall afternoon, I took my son Jamie to a leafy Washington park with a concrete court and an old basketball hoop. After playing some one-on-one and horse for a good hour as I showed Jamie that Dad still had the moves, we were sweat-drenched and grinning.
I’d noticed a middle-aged woman of Chinese descent watching us from the edge of the court. At first I thought nothing of it, though she wasn’t smiling, as one might while watching a father and son play. But she never seemed to look away. She also appeared to be taking pictures of the nearby National Cathedral at an angle that put us in the shots.
When we took our ball to leave, the woman turned briskly and walked toward a parked car. She looked back at me and slid in the front seat without breaking eye contact. While Jamie and I walked on, I turned and noticed that the woman, now sitting shotgun, continued to watch us closely.
“Jamie, jump in the car quick as you can,” I said.
I wheeled off, drove to the end of the Cathedral driveway, made a quick right, then another right, sneaking back around to slip in behind the car. A man who must have been lying in the back seat rose, walked around to the driver’s seat and drove off with the woman next to him. We followed them a few miles in, shall we say, an aggressive manner.
Back at the White House, I told a national-security official.
“You’re not supposed to follow them,” he said. “That could cause an incident. You might even get killed.”
“Who is ‘them’?”
“It’s China,” he said. “They do this sometimes to senior people when they first onboard in the White House. They want you to notice so you understand they are watching you and can get into your business any time they want.”
I recalled a discussion with my former American Enterprise Institute colleague Jim Lilley, who’d been US ambassador to China during the Tiananmen Square massacre and was, before his death, easily the American who understood China best.
“They do this kind of stuff all the time,” Jim told me. “They would film our new diplomats when they arrived in Beijing, often breaking into their cars and messing everything up, just to show us who was in charge. It was also amazing how often middle-aged men were propositioned by beautiful young Chinese women.”
In the following months, I worked with President Donald Trump and his senior economic and trade advisers on thorny issues in our trade deals with Mexico and Canada, South Korea and Germany. We found plenty of poorly thought-through clauses and exemptions, concessions past negotiators made from incompetence, indifference or fatigue that needlessly relinquished American jobs. We cleaned up those deals as best we could in tough talks with countries with whom we have long ties of blood, culture and commerce.
China was another story. As a candidate, Trump declared that “we can’t continue to allow China to rape our country.” As president, he tweeted: “China is neither an ally or a friend — they want to beat us and own our country.”
It sounded extreme, even to those of us deeply skeptical of China’s state-directed, mercantilist trade and industrial policies. And certainly there’s no justification for conflating the Chinese Communist Party with some American passerby who happens to be of Asian descent.
At the same time, irrational violence against Asian Americans is no reason to pull our punches in criticizing the actions of the Chinese government, which has hurt every American, indeed, everyone on earth.
When Trump introduced his China critique with all the subtlety of a 2×4, he rattled an establishment grown comfortable selling out to China. If centrally planned China outperforms free-market America, it accelerates the drift to socialism. As I settled into White House trade policy, I realized the president was right.
Germany wants to get the best deal it can for its carmakers. Mexico wants to sell us more autos and avocados. But China weaponizes trade in a way designed to strengthen its economy, technology and military at the expense of every American. They want to beat us, steal our intellectual property and own our country.
And they want White House officials who stand up to them to be intimidated, even to the point of trying to ruffle them when they play with their children.
Kevin A. Hassett was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019. His new book is “The Drift: Stopping America’s Slide to Socialism.”