--- title: Senator Ted Cruz: President Obama Must Respond to China description: The Chinese regime demonstrated that it is unafraid of using diplomatic provocation—and America has a way to fight back canonical: https://time.com/4485892/cruz-obama-china-provocation/ author: TIME article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-09-12T13:17:35.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:55:10.966Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Ted Cruz: Obama Must Not Fear Diplomatic Provocation og:description: The Chinese regime is unafraid of doing so—and America has a way to fight back og:url: https://time.com/4485892/cruz-obama-china-provocation/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5dbe0d7a406393a8/6988a572cd1bbad3f0702421/senator-ted-cruz-president-obama-diplomacy-liu-xiaobo.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 4896 og:image:height: 2754 og:image:alt: Liu Xiaobo Nobel Peace og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Ted Cruz: Obama Must Not Fear Diplomatic Provocation twitter:description: The Chinese regime is unafraid of doing so—and America has a way to fight back twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5dbe0d7a406393a8/6988a572cd1bbad3f0702421/senator-ted-cruz-president-obama-diplomacy-liu-xiaobo.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Senator Ted Cruz: President Obama Must Not Fear Diplomatic Provocation > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: China's Drift Towards a More Fragmented World [Watch (HLS stream): China's Drift Towards a More Fragmented World](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/jZ1U3aiv.m3u8) (2:49)  _Published 2015-06-02. Editor-at-large Ian Bremmer discusses China's financial growth and the challenges it faces in becoming the world's largest economy._ by [Sen. Ted Cruz](https://time.com/author/sen-ted-cruz/) ## Sen. Ted Cruz Sep 12, 2016 1:17 PM UTC  A picture of Liu Xiaobo seen inside the Nobel Peace Center on the day of The Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo on December 10, 2010\. The head of the Nobel committee placed the year's peace prize on an empty chair as Beijing raged against the award to the dissident, who remains in a Chinese prison cell. A picture of Liu Xiaobo seen inside the Nobel Peace Center on the day of The Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo on December 10, 2010\. The head of the Nobel committee placed the year's peace prize on an empty chair as Beijing raged against the award to the dissident, who remains in a Chinese prison cell. Daniel Sannum-Lauten—AFP/Getty Images by [Sen. Ted Cruz](https://time.com/author/sen-ted-cruz/) ## Sen. Ted Cruz Sep 12, 2016 1:17 PM UTC President Obama has returned from the final visit to Asia of his administration—a trip in which protocol breaches grabbed the headlines. [In an unprecedented display of bad manners](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-37269719), when Mr. Obama arrived in Hangzhou for the G20 meeting, the Chinese authorities did not provide the standard red-carpeted staircase so that he could depart Air Force One in a dignified fashion. They then employed strong-arm tactics to try to control the movements of the American press all the while quarreling with senior members of the President’s delegation. Undeterred, Mr. Obama announced that in coordination with Chinese President Xi Jinping, he intends to use executive fiat to try to [shackle the United States](https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/09/03/fact-sheet-us-china-cooperation-climate-change) to the wide-ranging United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—without submitting it to the Senate for ratification, instead choosing to impinge American sovereignty. One thing President Obama did not find time to do on his trip to China, however, was meet with Liu Xiaobo, the eminent author, academic and political activist who succeeded Mr. Obama as the Nobel Peace Laureate in 2010, and who happens to be the only living Peace Prize winner currently in prison. Dr. Liu is distinguished by his determined and selfless pursuit of peaceful political liberalization in the People’s Republic. Visiting Columbia University in the summer of 1989 when the Tiananmen Square protests began, he returned to China to become an opposition leader. He was one of the key architects of the Charter 08, published 20 years after Tiananmen and on the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Charter 08 calls for basic political reforms, including freedom of assembly, expression and religion, as well as a fair and independent judiciary. But even putting such words on paper, let alone peacefully advocating for their implementation, is deeply dangerous in the PRC. Dr. Liu has suffered for his audacity, enduring a series of punitive and arbitrary prison sentences, which is why he could not travel to Oslo to receive his Nobel Prize. Dr. Liu’s case recalls the previous example of a Nobel Peace Laureate having to accept the award _in absentia_ due to being unjustly imprisoned by an oppressive regime—Andrei Sakharov, who was honored in 1975 while imprisoned by the Soviets. Sakharov, a former nuclear scientist who had become a fierce critic of the USSR, seemed powerless before the Evil Empire. In the years after he received the Peace Prize, the Soviets tried to keep Sakharov out of the public eye by banishing him to Gorky. One man would not let Sakharov be forgotten, however: President Ronald Reagan. President Reagan did not refuse to meet with the Soviets or to negotiate with them. But he never once granted them moral parity, and he took every opportunity to highlight their human rights abuses. He tirelessly raised Sakharov’s case, including naming May 21, 1983 “National Andrei Sakharov Day” in honor of the dissident’s birthday and working with Congress to rename the portion of 16th Street in front of the Soviet Embassy after Sakharov—so that each and every piece of mail going in or out of that institution would bear his name. The Sakharov case is a worthy model for the sort of support the United States government could be showing for Dr. Liu today, and Congress took the first step in February when the Senate passed the legislation that I introduced to rename International Plaza in front of the PRC Embassy “Liu Xiaobo Plaza.” Swift passage by the House could have it on President Obama’s desk this month. He should sign the legislation and then follow up by naming December 28th, Liu’s birthday, “National Liu Xiaobo Day.” Unfortunately, President Obama’s administration insists that such steps are too provocative and that they know better how to get political prisoners released. In fact, astonishingly, Mr. Obama has threatened to veto the Plaza legislation in deference to the PRC’s objections. The proof is, as they say, in the pudding. Two years after Congress and President Reagan worked in tandem to draw attention to Sakharov’s plight—and make crystal clear which side America was on—Mikhail Gorbachev released him. Six years after Liu Xiaobo was awarded his Nobel Prize, he is still in jail as the American president remains silent. The Chinese regime has now demonstrated that it is not afraid of a little diplomatic provocation, and we shouldn’t be either. There is reason to be hopeful, as [Nathan Law was recently elected as the youngest person ever to sit on Hong Kong’s legislative council](https://www.ft.com/content/19602aa6-73fa-11e6-bf48-b372cdb1043a). Mr. Law is a reformer who was inspired to go into politics in 2010 after a teacher in his communist school went on a tirade lambasting Dr. Liu as a traitor. Why, Law wondered, would such a man get a Nobel Peace Prize? And so his political career began. Law’s success shows that change can come to China, but it won’t be because America let human rights be taken off the table. Congress can and should act quickly before the next recess to take an unambiguous stand with Liu Xiaobo, instead of with his Communist oppressors. ## Transcript One of the most interesting things about China today is that it's the only country in the world that has a global strategy. [ MUSIC ] That strategy is very decisively not... Military. They understand that they are spending a tiny fraction of what the Americans are on their global security and defence. They can't challenge the Americans anywhere outside bits of their region. But economically they can. They are spending well over a trillion dollars over a number of Of institutions and investments to support them. China continuing to grow economically and challenging the American economic system does automatically mean less American influence. And the question is, how is the US going to respond Unto that. One way to respond to it is by saying, we can't do global anymore. So, I mean, we'd like to do a global trade agreement. We can't. We have to support coalitions of the willing. So more attractive that the United States looks as a market, the more over time China is likely to reform its own economic Economic systems to challenge the U. S. less even as it continues to grow. I think that China when they become the world's largest economy will be by far the most uncertain in terms of their medium to long term trajectories of any major country in the world. And that should really unnerve us. 21st century won't be a Chinese century, but China will be the largest Economy and yet will be poor, it won't be an advanced industrial economy. It won't be a democracy. It won't be a free market system. And so that means the quality of global growth even if global growth is on average same as it is today, the riskiness of the growth will be greater, And there are many reasons for that I mean one is because a wealthier Chinese population with a Chinese authoritarian government, is gonna make much greater demands on opening that government the Chinese government will resist. So they'll be these existential questions of the Chinese communist party and political stability thereof. There is the question of the environment and the extraordinary challenges that the Chinese will have in terms of availability of water, about the breathability of Chinese air. You have the demographic challenges and the squeeze as there are fewer able- bodied Chinese men that are going to be able to actually drive that workplace. We're talking about problems that are really more than five years out and In many cases more than ten. So, China will become the world's largest economy in my view well before we start to really wonder about are these things going to unsettle the actual fabric of Chinese society. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4485892/cruz-obama-china-provocation/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4485892/cruz-obama-china-provocation/"},"headline":"Senator Ted Cruz: President Obama Must Not Fear Diplomatic Provocation","datePublished":"2016-09-12T13:17:35.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:55:10.966Z","description":"The Chinese regime is unafraid of doing so—and America has a way to fight back","url":"https://time.com/4485892/cruz-obama-china-provocation/","keywords":["politics"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5dbe0d7a406393a8/6988a572cd1bbad3f0702421/senator-ted-cruz-president-obama-diplomacy-liu-xiaobo.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Sen. 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