The world witnessed this week a kind of backbone and principle that has in recent years been lacking among leaders in the democratic world. Speaker Pelosi deserves to be applauded for her visit to Free China –– this, despite limp warnings from President Biden and the Democratic Party, and saber-rattling from China’s communists. 

The world also witnessed the extent to which the West’s ostensible elites have internalized Chinese Party propaganda –– some willfully, others unwittingly. For it is curious to have observed think tankers and opinion writers alike voice about Mrs. Pelosi’s trip concerns that are not only identical but identical, too, to those of the Chinese Communists.

“Nothing good will come of it,” the New York Times’s Tom Friedman opined, calling Mrs. Pelosi’s visit “utterly reckless.” It has “effectively sparked the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis,” Jerome Taylor of Agence France-Presse tweeted. The “damage” from Mrs. Pelosi’s “unwise trip to Taiwan must be contained,” the Washington Post ventured. China’s state-owned Global Times also called the visit “reckless,” and a “provocation.”

Sound familiar? As Beijing now hosts five days of live-fire military exercises around Taiwan, the pundits have again been quick to note that show of force comes on the heels of Mrs. Pelosi’s visit –– as if it were not itself reckless and would instead be an expected response to a “pointless provocation to China.”

Yet the notion that it is reasonable for a country to threaten military retaliation against another over a diplomatic visit is untenable. What’s more, the exercises –– which involve advanced weaponry including J-20 stealth fighter jets and Dongfeng-17 hypersonic missiles –– are of a scope and scale that exceed what could have been planned on short notice.

While China’s military could have ostensibly expanded what it had originally planned, much of the drills would have been choreographed and organized before Speaker Pelosi set foot in Taipei. What, then, of the synchronized commentary? 

Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, Beijing has gone to great lengths to extend and amplify the work of its United Front Work Department, a complex and opaque network of organizations designed to advance the party’s influence among domestic minority groups, and especially overseas. Its work proceeds largely through elite capture and public diplomacy.

In America, Europe, and elsewhere, Chinese friendship, culture, and economic societies; Chinese chambers of commerce; professional groups for Chinese science and technology experts; “public diplomacy” associations, student associations, and Confucius Institutes: All work to shape the global conversation about China and “tell China’s stories well.”

President Xi again emphasized the central role of the United Front at a party conference last week. The Front “must be maintained on a long-term basis” to “achieve national rejuvenation,” he said. In 2019, the Front’s budget was some $2.9 billion –– more than that of China’s ministry of foreign affairs. Twenty-three percent of the $2.9 billion was specifically designated toward foreign influence campaigns.

In July, the Times’s Mr. Friedman met with the president of China’s Center for Globalization, Wang Huiyao, during Mr. Wang’s visit to Washington. They palavered about, among other things, the “transformation of globalization in the post-pandemic era.” Mr. Wang then also met with a raft of think tank representatives.

Mr. Wang, meantime, advises several Chinese Communist Party agencies and serves in at least two –– the Western Returned Scholars Association and the China Overseas Friendship Association, both part of the United Front. Mr. Wang also helped to develop Communist China’s “Thousand Talents” program, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation has identified as an ostensible threat to American national security. 

July appears to have been a busy month for the United Front’s American-oriented projects. For last month the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a core organization of the United Front system, also held meetings at its Beijing headquarters with representatives from CNN, CNBC, and the Associated Press.

“If the United States can make the right choice from [the standpoint of] China’s historical culture, policy concepts, and reality … the issue of Sino-U.S. relations will be solved,” the association president, Lin Songtian, said. In other words, America should accept China’s vision of the global order –– or else. 

It could be a coincidence that these and other rendezvous were held in advance of Speaker Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan and Beijing’s military drills, and were then soon followed by corresponding messaging from American, European, and Chinese talking heads. 

Or, perhaps not. As this column has previously argued, the Chinese threat to the democratic world is not only military but cultural and ideological. This week we gained a glimpse of the degree of Communist China’s elite capture in Washington and Europe — when our diminutive leading legislator can visit the only democracy in China to discover that it’s she and not those menacing the aforementioned democracy with fighter aircraft and warships who is being set down, in unison with our own press, as “reckless.”