An editor of a Chinese-government controlled media group cited a CATO Institute article to argue against Senator Josh Hawley’s criticisms of the World Trade Organization in a tweet on Tuesday, telling the Missouri Senator to “get educated” on the benefits the globalist trade organization supposedly provides.

Here is response from a real WTO expert. Someone who actually knows about WTO. So get educated. https://t.co/5o4xrXpAWp

— Chen Weihua (@chenweihua) May 5, 2020

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Chen Weihua is the EU bureau chief of China Daily, a daily newspaper following in the mold of many Chinese media organizations in being entirely state-owned and affiliated with the Chinese government.

It would nominally comes as a surprise that an operative of the Chinese Communist Party would cite the free-trade libertarian think tank’s rebuttal to Senator Hawley’s argument against the WTO, but politics makes for strange bedfellows. Both the Chinese government’s outsourcing-based economic model and western corporate elites cozy with CATO benefit from a continued regime of low trade barriers and free trade, placing the ideological libertarians and Chinese communists in the same camp on trade policy.

Senator Hawley had put Weihua on blast for propagandizing against the populist-right senator’s call to abolish the World Trade Organization and replace it with an economic nationalist and pro-worker alternative. The WTO has been a critical element in the outsourcing of millions of American jobs and vital national industry to China and other countries where cheap labor is plentiful.

#China not happy about my call to confront their economic imperialism by ending the WTO & replacing it with system that’s good for American workers. I love being insulted by #china state-run press https://t.co/z7Y887ztvf

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) May 5, 2020

Staunch America First advocates pushed back against Weihua and CATO’s defense of “free trade” with China, with economic nationalists arguing that the country should never even have been let into the WTO to begin with.

Communist China should have never been allowed into the WTO. China has taken American manufacturing and millions of jobs to China using cheap slave labor – stealing US IP and R&D. China has not been a trade partner to US – they have engaged in one-sided trade practices.

— phyllis fabiani (@pfabiani) May 5, 2020