Exclusive$50B COVID Lawsuit: China Takes Aim at Missouri Senator

Welcome to China In Focus. I'm Kevin Hogan, in for Tiffany Meyer. Our top story, China is going after Senator Eric Schmidt in a $50 billion lawsuit against Missouri. The senator is calling the lawsuit a badge of honor. A pro-democracy activist who crossed into the U.S. is now facing an immigration trial. His mother says his safety would be in immense danger if he were returned to China. After he fled to the U.S., Chinese authorities interrogated his family and raided his home. It felt like a cold chill rising from my legs through my entire body. I couldn't even walk. President Trump is looking to boost Washington's ties with Peru, and analysts are watching how the move fits into broader U.S. strategy in the Western Hemisphere. President Trump is designating fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction. What impact will this move have on the fight against the lethal drug? China is slapping a $50 billion lawsuit on Missouri, calling the Xiaomi state an economic and reputational threat. The lawsuit targets Missouri's governor and two former attorneys general, Senator Eric Schmidt and FBI co-deputy director Andrew Bailey, both of whom spearheaded Missouri's lawsuit against the Chinese Communist Party. The state sued China for hoarding masks and other protective gear during the COVID-19 pandemic and won the case. Schmidt says he sees being sued by China as a badge of honor. Here's him speaking on Fox News. It's totally ridiculous. They're just mad that we exposed their lies and their deceit, but they unleashed COVID on the world. We sued them and we won, and so this is just sour grapes. They've sued me for $50 billion, but I won't be apologizing anytime soon, as you'd imagine. The lawsuit was filed by authorities in Wuhan and Chinese research bodies. It accuses Schmidt and Missouri officials of damaging China's reputation through what it calls malicious litigation. Schmidt rejects the claims, calling the case baseless lawfare meant to distract from China's pandemic response. Earlier this year, Missouri secured a $24 billion judgment against China. The state's current attorney general says she will work on collecting that money by seizing Chinese-owned assets in Missouri. That includes property, financial interests, and other holdings owned by Beijing. Meanwhile, the state of Mississippi also won a lawsuit against China last month. A judge ordered China to pay Mississippi more than $25 billion in COVID-related damages. And a man who risked his life to document facilities suspected of being Chinese concentration camps now faces a crossroad. A New York immigration court will rule on whether he can stay in the U.S. or be forced to leave. That's after ICE arrested him earlier this year for illegal entry. Across the Pacific, the Chinese Communist Party has taken notice and acted. Antides Flora Hua spoke with his mother on Tuesday. She says China has launched a coordinated operation targeting his family, adding that her son could face death threats if he's deported to China. Let's dive in. One message Guan Heng's lawyer and supporters want to convey to the U.S. government is this. The moment Guan loses U.S. protection, he will face serious threats from Beijing. But why will he become a target of Beijing? The answer lies in his YouTube videos. It's footage he risked his life to film in China's highly sensitive Xinjiang region. Human rights groups and governments say Beijing has persecuted ethnic minorities there, including Uyghurs in secret concentration camps. Guan recorded videos that media outlets and human rights researchers say provided evidence of those abuses. To escape the Chinese Communist Party's control and release the footage safely, Guan crossed the U.S. southern border four years ago. Months later, according to his mother, all of Guan's relatives in China were taken by law enforcement for hours-long interrogations. The entire discussion revolved around my son. Everyone was questioned for about one or two hours. They said that if there was any news or information related to Guan Heng, we had to report back to them immediately. The coordinated operation was executed in Guan's hometown, eastern China's Henan province. His mother says police forces from three different cities took action around the same time. Guan's father was summoned again just one month after police interrogated him for 10 hours during the first time. This time, he was taken by two police officers to a place with Ministry of State Security written on the door. That's when he realized the state security officials were involved. Police also raided Guan's home in China and confiscated his computer. None of the family members were told why. They were threatened with consequences if they failed to cooperate, and some relatives were pressured into cutting ties with Guan's family altogether. Guan's work has since been featured in award-winning reports and documentaries. Even though he applied for asylum shortly after arriving in the U.S., Guan later lost his freedom after ICE agents determined he had entered the country illegally. Despite his stated intentions and his pending asylum case, it felt like a cold chill rising from my legs through my entire body. I couldn't even walk. His lawyer told me Guan faces the risk of being deported to Uganda and that the only way to help him remain in the U.S. is to convince the court that such a ruling would endanger his safety. Uganda's government maintains close ties with the CCP and relies heavily on China for financial support. Flora Hua, NTD News. A push to reduce China's influence in Latin America. President Trump is looking to designate Peru as a major non-NATO ally. In a message to lawmakers, Trump highlighted that the U.S. and Peru share security priorities, including counter-narcotics efforts and boosting economic ties. A non-NATO ally status would give Peru certain military and economic benefits, such as access to U.S. military know-how, but it does not offer any security guarantees. Trump recently gave Saudi Arabia the same status to deepen relations. In return, Peru agreed to give U.S. troops access to its territory next year. American military personnel would conduct joint training and provide security assistance to Peruvian forces. Beijing has been cultivating its influence in Peru. Chinese shipping company Costco has a 60% stake in Chiang Kai, a deepwater port that can host both military and commercial ships. The move comes after the Trump administration updated its national security strategy, saying it wants to focus more on the Western Hemisphere. The goal is to prevent mass migration to the U.S., fight narco-terrorism, and ensure access to strategic locations. Trump says he is ordering a blockade on all sanctioned oil tankers going in and out of Venezuela in an effort to oust its leader Maduro, a longtime ally of Beijing. U.S. investment company BlackRock has also been trying to take over control of two ports in Panama from a Hong Kong company. More than 40% of U.S. container traffic travels through this key waterway. President Trump has designated fentanyl and its core precursor chemical as weapons of mass destruction earlier this week. The move paves the way for tougher sentences and targets the financial networks behind trafficking. It also strengthens national security efforts to disrupt those responsible for bringing the deadly drug into the U.S. Earlier, I spoke with Steve Yates, senior research fellow for China and national security at the Heritage Foundation, for his insight. Steve, thanks for your time. We know you lost your daughter to fentanyl about two years ago, and our condolences to you and your family. First, what does this executive order mean to you? Well, thank you very much. It does mean a lot to me and to many, many other families who've suffered a loss to this scourge. This is, I think, the culmination of a series of tools that the president has put into play to try to get at the sources of the scourge. It's not necessarily targeting the street vendors and the networks within the United States. There are existing channels that are actively trying to prosecute that part of this effort to protect our families. This is explicitly looking at those that are manufacturing and transporting and financing that enterprise as it brings it to our shores. Steve, thanks for juxtaposing the idea that just a few grains of salt equivalent of fentanyl is a deadly dose. With this concept, the big picture of how this substance is changing dynamics on a global scale, Trump says the illicit fentanyl is more of a chemical weapon than it is a narcotic, and it's killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. What message does it send to the Chinese regime, which oversees the production of precursor chemicals? Well, it's sort of like the immigration debate where there's a big difference between legal and illegal. So there's legal fentanyl. Ironically, my daughter went to the intensive care unit because of an illegal dose of fentanyl, and the swelling of the brain that causes mass pain in the human body was treated by legal fentanyl by the hospital while she was there. This action does nothing to affect the flow of legal fentanyl through proper channels to be used for that pain management process, but it does a lot to put reputational risk of financial institutions if they are involved in permitting this kind of illicit network to grow. So if like the Select Committee on Strategic Competition with the CCP identified entities within the People's Republic that were manufacturing and exporting this illicit flow, they are doing banking activity with a Chinese entity, just like we have with regard to North Korean nuclear programs or otherwise. We can label them as primary money laundering concerns. They're no longer allowed to engage in dollar-denominated transactions and participate in the U.S. financial network. It's a huge, almost nuclear-level financial instrument, and the Chinese government would have to be very, very careful about having any exposure to it. The U.S. can't bluff this. It would have to be serious about enforcement. Steve, I follow what you're saying. The actual financial aspect is one part of this, but the intelligence, the DHS can now use the full weight of the weapons of mass destruction and the nonproliferation measures to address this and try to get to the root cause. At the same time, critics of the designation say that labeling illicit fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction is overblown and that it could lower the bar for military intervention in this hemisphere. That's assuming these profit-driven cartels are terrorists and calling war on terror logic to combat drugs. How do you respond? Well, I just look at the accumulated death over the last 10 years. You have anywhere from half a million to a million Americans that have been killed by this chemical come in by illegal networks. If this had been a bomb, if this had been some kind of an attack with a seeable military, there wouldn't really be any question about the nature of the attack. It also has disproportionately hit the ages of 18 to 35 in the United States, the generation that should be getting recruited into the best military in the world or recruited into the best tech firms in the world to lead the future and to support our social safety net in our country. And so this in several respects is, I think, a very verifiable attack on the fabric of the American society. But even just in the tragic pure carnage of it, I think it is borderline immoral for people to try to minimize or categorize this as anything other than mass death. It's just not like what people had seen before. And I, at least for one, support use of all forms of pressure and legal instruments to try to minimize this enterprise. And I actually applaud the WMD designation is primarily going after financial instruments to keep us from having to deploy the military to do this as a first line of defense. Steve, I hear you loud and clear. Thank you for connecting the dots with us and sharing your insight on our show. My pleasure. Thank you so much for focusing on this. And coming up, Japan is showing increased support for Taiwan, with roughly 30 lawmakers set to visit the island soon. And China's coercion against Taiwan and Japan. What's at stake for the U.S. on this geopolitical chessboard? An expert weighs in. An incident could spark a larger conflict. In a sense, I think the Chinese would welcome that. Welcome back to China In Focus. I'm Kevin Hogan. Tensions between China and Japan continuing. It's all about Taiwan. Japan is showing increased support for the island. After Japan wrapped up its parliamentary session on Wednesday, roughly 30 Japanese lawmakers made plans to visit Taiwan beginning on Sunday. It's a move Tokyo says reflects shared democratic values. The tensions are spreading into the tourism industry. On Wednesday, Japan revealed that growth in Chinese visitors to Japan slowing sharply. This comes after Beijing's warning against traveling to the country as political friction escalated over Taiwan. Japan's National Tourism Organization reports just over 560,000 Chinese visitors in November, a 3% increase from last year. It's still increasing, but it's a sharp slowdown compared to the more than 40% growth Japan saw from January through October. The slowdown comes after relations took a turn last month. Earlier in November, Japan's prime minister told parliament that the country's military could get involved if there was an attack on Taiwan. Beijing retaliated to this comment by urging its citizens to avoid traveling to Japan. Chinese travel agencies pulled Japan tour packages, airlines offered free cancellations, and flights between the two countries were cut or suspended. Meanwhile, China took the opportunity to criticize Japan directly at the United Nations meeting earlier this week. Beijing's ambassador to the United Nations accused Japan's prime minister of fueling regional tensions and called for her to retract her statements on Taiwan. Japan pushed back, rejecting the accusations and emphasizing its commitment to peace. It's urging for calm, peaceful dialogue and restraint as diplomatic tensions between the two countries continue escalating. And tensions are rising across the Asia-Pacific fueled by China's military exercises and provocations against Japan and Taiwan. What are Beijing's strategic goals? How likely is conflict to turn kinetic? And what's at stake for the U.S.? To unpack all this, Tiffany Meyer spoke with Rick Fischer, senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center. Rick Fischer, thank you so much for joining us. Great to have you back on the show. Tiffany, thank you for having me back. And there seems to be a lot of tensions in the sea and the skies around, you know, China, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, because the U.S. actually just flew a nuclear-capable bomber alongside Japanese jets over the Sea of Japan. That comes a day after Russian nuclear-capable bombers were flying alongside Chinese jets that was near kind of the Okinawa Islands. How are you reading all of these escalations, if you will, in that region? China is engaged in a major effort to set new narratives, to undermine existing pillars of stability, and to coerce American allies and eventually the United States into following its diktat. The Chinese exercises, a hundred ships being deployed largely along the length of East Asia, but with the concentrations of a carrier strike group passing through the Miyako Straits in the middle of the Japanese Ryukyu Island chain, and then exercising on the East Coast of Japan very provocatively, sets something of a precedent in which military pressure has just been added to over a month of intense Chinese diplomatic and propaganda pressure in the wake of the new Japanese Prime Minister Takeichi's questioning on November 8, whether a Chinese attack against Taiwan would be a quote-unquote survival-threatening situation that in recent Japanese legislation would require Japan to mobilize military forces and potentially intervene in a Chinese strike against Taiwan. So what China is really doing is trying to scare Japan, and by extension, scare the United States from coming to the defense of Taiwan, which signals more than ever that the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, intends to attack Taiwan in order to destroy that democracy. I want to get to the U.S. part, but very quickly on Taiwan. In terms of Takeichi's comments, other national security analysts have been saying it was kind of always assumed that Japan would take that stance, but maybe never explicitly stated that strongly before. But given Communist China's response, it also doesn't seem that surprising. Many are saying that Communist China is always looking for an excuse to essentially bully the neighboring countries. How are you reading that dynamic? How alarmed should we be at this version or this latest escalation, if you will? Well, it is an indication of the Chinese Communist Party's confidence that it has sufficient military strength to dare to bully Japan. That is itself a very powerful country. With simply four or five of Japan's 2423 submarines, they have enough torpedoes to sink all 100 Chinese ships that were deployed last week. So this is not an inconsequential move or decision by the Chinese Communist Party to actually bully Japan in this way. So my sense is they felt that they were strong enough. They were looking for an excuse, as you said, others have said, and they took it. Now when it comes to the U.S., because the U.S. and Japan do have a basically mutual defense treaty that was signed back in 1951, where if one is attacked, the other would come and defend it. With all of these moves by China, are we getting closer to that being triggered? Could it go kinetic? An incident could quickly spin out of control because of Chinese miscalculation, a Japanese trigger finger, an airplane gets too close. Yes, an incident could spark a larger conflict. In a sense, I think the Chinese would welcome that. They would welcome a limited conflict that would result in the death of both Chinese and Japanese and Americans, but that the incident would be contained so they would, A, preserve their strength for the larger fight, but make the point, the larger point, and hopefully coerce the United States and Japan into backing down at least some level diplomatically in their support for Taiwan. When it comes to Taiwan, the Chinese communist regime has actually never ruled the island, so there is no reunification that they like to talk about. But when it comes to, say, Japan saying that that would trigger its own survival, Taiwan and Japan are both part of what's known as the first island chain. So talk to us about how important that is, especially for America's safety, if that were to be broken and, say, China's deep water navy ships and submarines could get into those waters. Well, the loss of Taiwan would be a strategic disaster on many levels. Taiwan is right in the base of the first island chain. The first island chain essentially contains Chinese global power projection. So if the Chinese Communist Party were to take control of Taiwan, it would immediately work to turn it into a massive military base for their naval forces, air forces, missile forces, nuclear submarines. Taiwan would be an unsinkable aircraft carrier that they could use to blockade Japan, blockade South Korea, intimidate the Philippines, essentially force the Japanese, the South Koreans, and the Filipinos to do what the Chinese have long wanted, to basically decide between whether the Americans can guarantee their freedom with peace or whether they should surrender to the Chinese Communist Party's diktat, get rid of their alliances with the United States, and send American military power back to Hawaii. Well, definitely a lot to watch for here. Rick Fisher, as always, thank you so much for joining us. Tiffany, thank you. That's all for today's China In Focus. I'm Kevin Hogan, in for Tiffany Meyer. If you have any feedback on the show or have something you'd like to see us cover, send us an email at chinainfocusatntd.com. And for round-the-clock original news coverage, visit us at ntd.com or download our NTD app. Thanks for watching. See you soon.