#Trump admin to name China greatest national security threat: report

The Trump administration is set to publicly warn that China poses the greatest national security threat to the United States, according to a report.

The warning, according to Axios, will be delivered by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe Thursday in one of a series of statements and appearances in which he will name the US-China relationship as the defining issue of our time.

The media campaign will be one in a series of efforts from across the outgoing Trump administration to raise public awareness about China’s aggressive crusade to replace the United States as the No. 1 global superpower.

The news, reported Thursday, comes just one day after it was revealed that over 1,000 Chinese researchers had fled the US amid a Justice Department-led crackdown on technology theft.

That revelation came during the Aspen Institute’s virtual Cyber Summit, when John Demers, who runs the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said at least 1,000 researchers had left the country since they launched multiple criminal cases against Chinese operatives for espionage.

“Only the Chinese have the resources and ability and will” to engage in the breadth of foreign influence activity that US intel agencies have seen in recent years, Demers explained.

In response, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman called the comments “ludicrous,” adding that, “in the eyes of some Americans, there is only hatred, division and confrontation.”

The Trump administration and Beijing have seen relations sink to an all-time-low this year, with the situation worsening.

On Thursday, the US announced that it was issuing travel curbs to members of China’s ruling Communist party and any immediate family members.

The new restrictions, according to the State Department, were intended to protect the US from the CCP’s “malign influence.”

“For decades we allowed the CCP free and unfettered access to US institutions and businesses while these same privileges were never extended freely to US citizens in China,” the department said in a statement.

In response, the Chinese government slammed the decision, calling it “an escalation of political suppression” against Beijing and threatened it would damage the US’ global image.

The US does not appear deterred by Beijing’s anger, though, as evidenced by a Reuters report this week that the Trump administration plans to add the Chinese-state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp. to its group of blacklisted companies with ties to the Chinese military.

The move will come from the Defense Department, which will also designate Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and a number of others as being owned or controlled by the Chinese military.

The administration also announced this week that it would block cotton imports from a company in China’s Xinjiang region, where Communist leaders have detained an estimated 1 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities since 2016.

These ethnic minorities are held in internment camps and prisons where they are subjected to ideological discipline, forced to denounce their religion and language and physically abused.

CCP officials, however, have long suspected Uyghurs of harboring separatist tendencies because they have their own culture, language and religion.

In the Trump administration’s move Wednesday, done through Customs and Border Protection, the US will no longer accept shipments containing cotton or cotton products from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.

The reason, they argued, was the “reasonable” indications of slave labor.

With Post wires