Today’s Front Line of Freedom is Digital

As delivered at the Palmetto Club in Columbia, South Carolina – November 19, 2025

Photo: Jeff Blake

Marco Polo traveled to China in the 1300s to learn how the world really worked.
Today, let me share a few stories of two modern Marcos—Mark Kennedy and Mark Duffy—and what we learned in China, and why those lessons matter for Columbia, for Carolina, and for America.

My wife Debbie and I came to Columbia for a reason. Columbia is not just the capital of a great state. It is the oldest poetic name for America itself.

And I wanted to see this Columbia—free, confident, and thriving—before Beijing gains even more power to exert leverage over a place like this.

Because Debbie and I once traveled to Hong Kong with a similar purpose.
We visited in 1989 because we wanted to see it before Beijing assumed control—before its freedoms were tested.
In 1997, when China took Hong Kong from the United Kingdom, the CCP promised the world it would preserve the city’s liberties until 2047.

I didn’t trust that promise then, and time proved me right.
In 2020, Beijing broke its word and crushed Hong Kong’s freedoms—twenty-seven years early.

And that same year, Beijing revealed another ambition—its Dual Circulation strategy—a plan to become independent of reliance on Western goods while making the rest of the world increasingly dependent on China.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: Beijing already has levers it can pull on South Carolina.

South Carolina builds planes, ships, turbines, and advanced machinery—industries that rely on the strongest permanent magnets on earth.
China controls over 90% of the processing capacity for these rare earth magnets.

These magnets power aircraft actuators, precision-guided systems, industrial motors, robotics, and wind turbines.

If China tightens exports—as it has done before—production lines in Spartanburg, Greenville, and North Charleston feel it quickly.

Agriculture is no safer. China is the world’s largest buyer of soybeans.
When Beijing suspended U.S. soybean purchases during the trade war, South Carolina farmers watched prices collapse.
Beijing didn’t need a weapon—it used market power.

And the iPhone in our pockets is a metaphor for it all.
Even when assembled in India or Vietnam, its guts—magnets, sensors, casings, circuit boards, batteries—still overwhelmingly come from China.
And what’s true of the iPhone is true of our medicines, solar panels, drones, telecom networks, power electronics, and key components used in South Carolina factories.

Beijing does not need political influence here to exert pressure.
It has supply chains.
It has choke points.
And it has patience.

Which brings me to experiences in Beijing that changed how I see all of this.

A Question in Beijing

A decade ago, I gave a lecture in Beijing titled “Achieving a New Golden Age of Trade.” My message was cooperative, focused on win-win prosperity.

But the questions that followed were sharp: “Why is America trying to keep China down?”

That accusation startled me. In 2001, my first year in Congress, I voted to maintain Normal Trade Relations with China—opening the door to WTO membership and to growth that lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty.

We weren’t trying to keep China down.
But Beijing was already pursuing what it later named Dual Circulation:
independence for itself, dependence for others.

They weren’t being kept down.
They were already placing the stones of a strategy meant to constrain us.

A Glimpse Behind the Firewall

As I prepared to fly home from that trip, I experienced Beijing’s impulse for control firsthand.

At the airport, I was stopped after baggage screening.
A guard seized my passport and led me to a windowless room beside an elevator shaft. The elevator opened with a stranger’s suitcase. He ordered me to open it. I refused.

Then the elevator returned with my own luggage. He paged slowly through brochures for places I planned to take my George Washington University students—silent, methodical.

Finally, when I was released for my flight, I emailed my communications director:
“I’ve just been detained for nearly an hour. Should we go public?”

I hit send. The message disappeared—never received, never in my outbox. Erased.

As a former Congressman, I wasn’t frightened for myself.
But I thought of my students. I thought of my children.

And I glimpsed a future no free society should accept—
a world where truth can be deleted and silence enforced by code.

The Two Marks and the Forbidden City

Soon after, I returned to China with GW graduate students—including today’s host, Mark Duffy.

One evening, we set off to see Tiananmen Square—the place where, in 1989, Beijing crushed the hopes of students asking for more liberty. You may remember the young man who stood, alone, in front of a tank.

Along the way we paused to watch two men play wei qi—the ancient game of encirclement. Stone by stone, they quietly built inevitability.

Photo: Richard Marko

We continued toward Tiananmen Square, until we found our way blocked with walls on three sides.

I noted a small opening guarded by a lone guard.
I looked at him. He looked at me. I stepped through. Mark and the students followed.

Suddenly we were inside the Forbidden City, China’s ancient imperial capitol—after dark, alone in its silent courtyards.

The irony of the name was not lost on us.
Forbidden—China’s past, and in many ways, its digital future.

Where emperors once sealed power behind stone walls, the CCP now seals power behind firewalls and data controls.

That night, two Marks walked through an unexpected opening and learned a truth that still guides me:

Even in systems built on control, openings exist.
Freedom survives by finding them—and widening them.

Our challenge is to ensure the digital world becomes not a new Forbidden City,
but a League of Free Cities—a networked commons where innovation, transparency, and trust prevail.

Clausewitz and Sun Tzu—Chess vs. Wei Qi

The game Mark and I saw on that street corner was more than a game.
It was a strategy lesson.

America thinks in Clausewitz and chess—seeking the decisive battle, declaring checkmate.

China thinks in Sun Tzu and wei qi—encircle patiently, sacrifice today for advantage tomorrow, win without fighting.

Beijing plays wei qi with supply chains, rare earths, standards, infrastructure, and critical technologies.

And while China sacrifices short-term profit for long-term control,
we too often sacrifice long-term strength for short-term comfort.

Freedom cannot survive on quarterly thinking.

Wiring the World for Trust

If we want a free future, we must build it.

We need an alliance that defends systems as NATO defends territory—
a Club for Good.

A world that is:

• Red-Free where it matters with no authoritarian access to control layers of critical networks.
• Red-Resilient where it empowers—multiple suppliers, rapid switch-out capacity.
• Red-Competitive where it innovates—trusted technology that keeps fear from becoming the world’s operating system.

From Tallinn to Taipei, São Paulo to Seoul, and Columbia to Colorado,
let those committed to transparency and trust wire the world together.

South Carolina’s Lesson

South Carolina knows how to build. Ships. Jets. Microchips.

It also knows that prosperity rests on reliability, openness, and trust.

The same discipline that made this state’s ports and factories thrive
must now guide our digital shipyards: fast, secure, resilient, free.

Closing — From Forbidden Walls to Open Gates

When I was detained at Beijing’s airport, I saw a system that fears truth.
When two Marks watched wei qi on a street corner, we saw the patience of its long game.
When we stepped through the gate of the Forbidden City, we discovered that even in closed worlds, openings remain.

Our task is clear:

To ensure the digital world becomes not a Forbidden City of surveillance,
but a League of Free Cities built on trust.
To wire the world for freedom, not fear.
To pay liberty’s carrying cost today so our children inherit both prosperity and principle.

Steel once bound free nations. Now silicon must.

The front line of freedom is no longer drawn on maps—
it runs through code, chips, and the choices we make about who wires our world.

Let us choose resilience over convenience.
Let us widen every opening in the wall.
And let us build, together, a League of Free Cities worthy of every generation that refused to live behind firewalls—or fear.

Thank you— and thank you, Mark, for walking through that gate with me then, and for all you do to keep South Carolina free.

Views expressed are Mark Kennedy’s own, not NYUs.