In March, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment (ATA). For the first time, the ATA identified the People’s Republic of China as the most capable threat actor that now confronts the United States. The reasons for ranking China as the top threat—militarily, economically, diplomatically, and informationally—are made clear in Seven Things You Can’t Say About China, a crisply written new book by US Senator Tom Cotton.
Cotton’s slim volume is a very readable and clear-eyed look at China’s capabilities, actions, and intent to challenge the US. Intended for a general audience, the book reflects Cotton’s keen understanding of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) decades-long plan to undermine US global leadership and the insights about China’s leadership he has gained from serving as a member, and now chairman, of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
In Seven Things You Can’t Say About China, Cotton pulls no punches and calls out the media conventions, ideological leanings, commercial interests, and diplomatic niceties that preclude our leaders saying that China is an “evil empire,” waging economic war on the world, preparing for armed conflict, infiltrating US society and government, and targeting American children. He makes the case for each of these “unsaid” six things and concludes with the sobering assessment that Beijing could win the struggle for global supremacy—another unpleasant truth that goes unsaid.
Evil, Intention, and Infiltration
Much of what Cotton has written in this book could be dismissed by some readers as hyperbole. But his sharp, short arguments—written clearly and succinctly—are well-reasoned and supported by salient facts. His claim that China is an evil empire, for example, is buttressed when he describes ways the CCP built a “dystopian police state to monitor, manipulate and master its people.” He cites forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations that were used to enforce the party’s One Child Policy; the suppression of religious freedom, and Christianity and the Falun Gong movement in particular; the genocidal campaigns against the people of Tibet and Chinese Uyghurs; and a social-credit score that measures the average Chinese citizen’s political reliability and determines access to everything from education to housing.
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