As America and Japan inch closer to confrontation with China over competing interests in the South China Sea, it’s useful to remind people that, contra the Left’s attempts whitewash the Chinese Communist Party’s actions, the communist party is still communist. If anything President Xi Jinping’s regime represents a turn back to the hardline Communism that had been somewhat papered over since the days of Deng Xiaopeng but never forgotten. We can see this in the recent news that China is now going to require that all companies have a “Communist Party unit” to insure party discipline in the workplace. From Reuters via Yahoo! News:

China has passed a regulation ensuring government organizations and private companies have Communist Party units so that party policy can be implemented across society, the People’s Daily, the official party mouthpiece, said on Saturday.

The regulation was passed on Friday at a meeting of the Politburo, one of the Communist Party’s elite ruling bodies, with President Xi Jinping in attendance.

With how our government operates, we won’t have units in our workplace designed to enforce party discipline by such a name. Nevertheless, we can still see a similar trend by the Left in government to coerce businesses into obeying complicated, costly, and frequently unnecessary regulations in the name of nebulous concepts like “social justice”. The decision by Obama administration’s Department of Labor to prepare what amounts to a “blacklist” of companies it doesn’t like represents a unsettling trend in the same direction.

It’s also useful to keep this in mind as we craft our foreign policy decisions. Right now, we cannot sever our ties with China completely, but stories like this should absolutely give policymakers pause about becoming too friendly with the Middle Kingdom.