Melissa Chen: Is There a Bigger Threat than China? | Stories of Us

Over the last few decades, China has infiltrated American institutions in order to advance its own strategic goals. China is the biggest threat to America as it stands today. My name is Melissa Chen, and this is my story. I'm from Singapore. That's where I was born. My parents were Methodists, so I was raised in a very conservative household. Singapore was that kind of society that Prioritize law and order. If you go to Singapore as a tourist, there's a funny t-shirt that everyone likes to bring back home. It says, Singapore is a fine city. And on the t-shirt, there are all the different fines. You can get fined for eating on the train, bringing a durian, which is a very smelly fruit, anywhere in a public space. You cannot buy chewing gum there. There are laws against free speech. Any speech that disrupts social harmony or religious harmony is illegal and it's very suffocating. My father worked for the Singapore government. He was in military intelligence. He worked for the Ministry of Defence and so I kind of always grew up with this sense of what prioritising national security was really like and why it was so important. His job was to keep Singapore safe from external threats. I knew how much. Small countries like Singapore rely on the U.S. security umbrella to thrive. In particular, Singapore is a shipping hub. You know, it's a free trade port. And that free trade was guaranteed by the U.S. Navy. I just love what America stands for. So in your face. It's so different. It's so unapologetic. And there's something very appealing about that. And so from the time I was in high school, I was plotting. I was plotting my escape. I knew that I wanted to come to America. So I had the opportunity to come to the U.S. to attend university. I touched down at Boston Logan Airport, 17 years old, and I was very excited. I was with my dad, so the moment we got into the cab and were speeding to university campus, I was looking around, and we were going under these bridges, and I was like, things are rusting. They seem to be falling apart. And I'd never seen roads in such bad conditions in my life. I had never seen anything like this in Singapore. Everything back home was new and pristine. And then when we got to the campus, I was surprised to see squalor on the streets, because in Singapore we didn't have homeless people. While I was in school, over time, there were newfangled ideas and a new orthodoxy that was slowly starting to creep in about race, about identity. The environment on campus became so rigid. Who could speak? Who was worth paying attention to, who had moral authority to speak, was now entirely based on identity. And it wasn't because it was the government censoring speech, it was because it was our peers. It was university administrators. It was people on social media. It was what would become, eventually, cancel culture. And it instills a kind of, not just anxiety, but eventually self-censorship. And it started to look exactly like the place that I was trying to escape from. I had left a comfortable life in Singapore to find true freedom in America. And that's why I started feeling very compelled to speak out and start writing about the culture war and start writing about politics. When I became a journalist, my career kind of got supercharged, especially during COVID, because that was a period of time when there was a lot of people who were too afraid to say what they thought. All crime went up during that period of time because the streets were empty, everyone's on lockdown, businesses were out. And so you didn't have eyes on the streets and anyone kind of walking, you know, easy sucker punch. And that was going on. But It was presented as if it was an epidemic of Asian hate, like it wasn't just COVID virus, you also had Asian hate. And I saw that happening, but not in the way it was being presented to us. And if you're kind of the first person sticking your head up to challenge the consensus, yeah, you get called all sorts of things by even friends. But I felt convicted to speak out, so I did. I started paying close attention to China, and it became clear the way the mainstream media was writing about China. They were getting China wrong, in the sense that you had famous CEOs extol the Chinese way of economic development. And I could see where this was leading. I also knew the values that the Chinese... Communist Party touts, they are entirely in opposition to the United States. And so I could see that as China rises, with the help of the United States, through theft, through industrial espionage, that as the Chinese got more and more powerful, they would be able to coerce other countries around the world to adopt its norms. They would be able to coerce us, the United States. Become more like them and it was slowly starting to happen and I knew I wanted to do more than write about it I wanted to make change. I ended up leaving journalism and now I work at a business intelligence firm and My firm quantifies and analyzes China exposure for US corporations US NGOs and other governments as well. China is the biggest threat to America as it stands today over the last few decades China has infiltrated American institutions across every domain in order to advance its own strategic goals to displace the United States as the sole superpower in the world. Right now, the biggest risk with China is space and AI, because especially with AI, If China achieves AI supremacy over the United States, it will get to set the terms and set the norms of this fourth industrial revolution, the next phase of human development. And that is very scary because AI is such a fundamental thing that's going into everything. If Chinese censorship, which we know from Chinese AI models, for example, that if you try to ask deep-seek questions about Tiananmen Square, Questions that the Chinese government find problematic, you'll not get honest answers. And if that becomes the standard AI that gets used in everything, then we're going to import the Chinese orthodoxy, the Chinese model into the West. They treat every single economic interaction as if it's a political warfare. In the Chinese-led world order, one need only look at how China treats its own citizens. And do we like that? Do we like a world of social credit, of surveillance, of not being able to choose your next leader? Because that is the world that China has built for its own people. What China has been doing to subvert the United States in smuggling fentanyl and getting Americans hooked onto fentanyl and dying from fentanyl is shocking in terms of the numbers. So just to give you some context, the peak of this was really between the years 2021 to 23. More than 70,000 Americans were dying from fentanyl. And that is more than the combat deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam combined. It was the number one leading cause of death for American males under 45, and this is even surpassing COVID during the COVID years. And we know it's coming from the Chinese because 90% of the precursors are coming from China. They're being shipped to Chinese-controlled ports in Mexico, so the U.S. has no jurisdiction of it. The Mexican cartels are then assembling this into forms that look like street drugs. And those machines that fashion them into drugs are all coming from China as well. So they're selling them to the cartels. The thing about fentanyl is that it's not your hardcore drug-taker. We're talking about people who are college students who just tried to get black market Adderall, not knowing that it was cut with a little bit of fentanyl. And so if you can take out and get Americans hooked on fentanyl, it is extremely destabilizing for societies. I think America has the right constitution, the right foundation to deal with anything. You know. Bill Clinton said that there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America. As long as we have free speech, we can fix anything. America has many different centers of power. It has the states, it has local governments, the federal system. If a progressive state like California is doing badly, it will show. When populations migrate to other states, that state loses seats in the House. And you've seen that happen. You know, people have flocked since COVID to Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and they're not coming back. So that's a signal to California. Maybe it's time to make a change, right? And so there are ways to correct the system. Look at a country like China. There's no way to correct that. If you are Chinese, You are just a cog in the machine, and you have to go with the flow. You cannot choose your representatives. You cannot speak freely. I still believe in the American way of life. There is nowhere else on earth with more freedom, and we need to protect it. Thank you for watching this video. To keep PragerU videos free, please consider making a tax-deductible donation.