Chinese State Media Hack Cites CATO Institute To Defend Globalist Trade Policies

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May 5, 2020

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.

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.

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.

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