A Dangerous Circle: How the CCP Uses Israel and Saudi Arabia to Infiltrate America
In a recent report for the Libertarian Institute, I traced connections between the American and Saudi players rebuilding Gaza into a surveillance city-state—and building Saudi surveillance cities whose offshoots are finding their ways to America. Digging deeper into these links shows an even more troubling picture with sharper implications for American policy and even, disturbingly, some Americans’ daily lives.
The connections begin with China’s infiltration of Saudi Arabia, but they don’t end there. They move across the Atlantic to America at the hands of Saudi-connected politicians backed by American supporters of Israel. Then they circle back to China and its infiltration of the United States via state-owned companies buying up American property at the hands of the same American movers backing the Saudis and Israel.
What emerges from an investigation is a class of operators who, under the headings of “modernization” and “western values,” are pushing government-backed corporate arrangements that put America and Americans at the mercy, globally and locally, of unaccountable elites—the very kind of subjugation opposed by believers in America First.
Chinese investment in Saudi Arabia is little-known enough in America to miss the front pages of most of our newspapers, and well-known enough worldwide to emit an endless list of online results. “Saudi Arabia is seeking billions in Chinese investment for [its new mega-city] Neom”; “NEOM hosts leading industry figures and investors for its ‘Discover NEOM’ China showcase”; “Splashy Saudi mega-project NEOM chases Chinese funds”; “Chinese company completes project in Saudi futuristic city NEOM.” These results are from the summer of 2024 alone. By September 2024, The Eurasia Review was reporting that “in August, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign Public Investment Fund signed six agreements worth US$ 50 billion with Chinese firms to encourage capital flows” for the purpose of building Neom.
As I’ve reported for the Libertarian Institute, Neom is a “vertical city” based around the Line: “the ultimate sidescraper,” a building the height of a skyscraper but turned on its side to snake across the ground. It will “eventually accommodate 9 million people and will be built on a footprint of just 34 square kilometers.” (As I mentioned in the past, to put this in perspective, New York City has an area of about 778 square kilometers and a population of approximately 8.2 million.) According to the New York Post, quoting Marwa Fatafta, a policy manager for the digital rights organization Access Now:
“Although Neom and other cities like it are being marketed as ‘smart’ or ‘eco cities,’ they’re actually ‘surveillance cities’ because ‘essentially they’re built on an architecture that is fueled by people’s personal data…China is playing a major role in distributing surveillance technology, so as to enable the creation of [cities like Neom]—part of…Xi Jinping’s larger plan to ‘normalize and seek to legitimize [China’s] vision of a state-led cyberspace and surveilled public’…It would appear that the Saudi Prince—whose ties with Jinping have recently grown stronger—is eager to assist…”
Read more at The Libertarian Institute.