Chinese President Xi Jinping is demanding better disaster prevention after floods and landslides killed dozens of his citizens — and American leaders could learn from the basic principle of taking care of your own first.
The contrast is damning. Reuters reports Xi called for "continuously improving our ability and level of prevention and response to various natural disasters" after landslides killed 25 people in Gansu province and 51 in Chongqing. His remarks, published in the Communist Party journal Qiushi, urged pre-disaster prevention, stronger monitoring, early-warning systems, and closing gaps in flood-control infrastructure. Xi even wants to deploy artificial intelligence, drones, and satellite remote sensing for rescue efforts.
Meanwhile, American communities across the country are still waiting for federal disaster relief and infrastructure repairs that never seem to arrive. Our bridges get structurally deficient ratings. Our power grids fail. And instead of fixing that, our leaders look the other way while foreign influence operations run in our schools.
According to WJLA, a new report from Defending Education found that 83 universities and 26 K-12 schools have participated in China's Young Envoys Scholarship program — an initiative announced by Xi in 2023 to bring 50,000 U.S. students to study in China over five years. The program is guided by Marxism-Leninism and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism. A 2024 trip from Muscatine High School in Iowa was personally arranged by Xi and fully funded by the Chinese government. Ivy League institutions including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia participated.
Defending Education President Nicole Neily raised the obvious question: "What are these children bringing back and how will technology that they bring with them be used to track them in the future?" Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks called it a national security concern. The Chinese Embassy's response was to warn against "politicizing normal people-to-people educational and economic exchanges."
When Defending Education released its first report in 2023, dozens of governors from both parties didn't respond. That bipartisan silence told Americans everything they need to know about who Washington serves.
Xi is looking out for Chinese citizens and Chinese infrastructure. Our leaders can't be bothered to do the same for Americans. That's not a foreign policy problem — it's a loyalty problem.
