The CIA team promoted allegations that members of the ruling Communist Party were hiding ill-gotten money overseas and slammed as corrupt and wasteful China’s Belt and Road Initiative

I mean, that’s all very true.

which provides financing for infrastructure projects in the developing world, the sources told Reuters.

This isn’t. It doesn’t “provide”, it’s a debt trap and widely seen as a complete failure.

One might argue back and forth how ethical, appropriate and useful influence campaigns like these are, but this doesn’t change anything about the fact that China is a considerable threat that needs to be contained.

Xi’s inept “wolf warrior diplomacy” that is destroying diplomatic and economic ties that took both sides decades to build, illegal market manipulation (highly subsidized EV cars, for example), imperialist expansionism in the region, the formerly nine, now ten-dash-line, his increasingly rabid and racist Han-nationalism, the transparent (but, from the looks of it, just as laughably inept) preparations for a Russian-style assault on Taiwan, border skirmishes with nearly all neighbors, open military and industrial support of Russia in its genocidal war against Ukraine, their secret police stations all over the world to harass and intimidate Western citizens of Chinese descent, massive social media campaigns and manipulation at a scale the CIA could never pull off (they were stupid enough to get countless teenagers to flood their senators with phone calls against the new divestment law, illustrating precisely why this law was necessary) - and that’s just things they do outside of the country. There’s the genocide against the Uyghurs and Tibetans, murdering people, usually members of persecuted minorities, for their organs (to this day, nobody can provide any other explanation for the ridiculous availability of organ transplants in China), routine torture and disappearances, show trials and public mass executions, destruction of the environment at a scale never seen before in any other country, etc.

I’m no fan of the CIA, never have been, but something clearly needs to be done about this awful regime. The world would be a significantly better place without it.

Wonder where he took the idea from…