Politics & Technology
NewsOnScale Staff
October 23, 2026
The Chinese Communist Party controls 1.4 billion people with a relatively small number of party members. It does not do this primarily through military force. It does it by controlling the infrastructure every Chinese citizen depends on to communicate, to work, to buy food, to travel, and to participate in society.
WeChat is one app. It controls messaging, payments, identity verification, social access, and increasingly government services. If you lose access to WeChat in China you lose access to your money, your contacts, your business, and your ability to function in modern Chinese society. The party controls WeChat. Therefore the party controls everyone who depends on it.
Alibaba controls commerce. Baidu controls information. The party controls all of them — through ownership stakes, board appointments, regulatory pressure, and the implicit understanding of what happens to companies and individuals who do not comply.
You do not need a soldier on every corner when you control the infrastructure every person on every corner depends on to live.
Look at America.
The American infrastructure map
Elon Musk owns X — the platform that has become the primary infrastructure of American political communication. He owns SpaceX, which holds billions in government defense contracts. He has a formal role in the federal government. He recently invested $1 billion in Skydance, giving him a financial stake in CNN, CBS, and HBO. He is considering merging SpaceX and Tesla into a single entity that would control electric vehicles, satellite internet, space launch, and media simultaneously.
Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — the social communication infrastructure for three billion people worldwide including hundreds of millions of Americans. A New Mexico jury just found his company lied to users about privacy 43 million times.
Jeff Bezos owns Amazon — the commerce infrastructure for American retail. He owns AWS — the cloud infrastructure that runs the US government, the CIA, and most of the internet. He owns the Washington Post.
Larry Ellison owns Oracle — the data infrastructure for the US government and federal intelligence agencies. His son David, a Trump ally, now controls CNN, CBS, and HBO through Skydance.
These four men between them control American communication, commerce, cloud infrastructure, government data, defense contracting, and media. They know each other. They invest in each other. They share a common interest in maintaining the conditions that allow their dominance to continue.
This is not a free market. This is the American version of the Chinese model. Private instead of party. But the mechanism is identical.
Control the infrastructure. Control the people who depend on it.
What happens to people who build outside the system
In China if you build a platform that competes with WeChat without party approval it gets shut down. If you speak publicly about the party's control of infrastructure you disappear. If you try to run for office outside the party's permission structure you are removed.
The mechanisms are cruder in China. The principle is the same in America.
A declared presidential candidate who built competing payment infrastructure, a competing media platform, a competing social network, and competing financial tools — and who filed a federal lawsuit documenting the suppression of those products — has had three campaign accounts banned, suppressed, or targeted. Twenty one banks refused to open his campaign account. Every major platform he uses to communicate with voters either banned him, fed his account inappropriate content, or made his content algorithmically invisible.
He was not arrested. He was not disappeared. He was financially isolated, communicatively suppressed, and biometrically identified — all while the platforms taking these actions against him are defendants in his active federal lawsuit.
Different tools. Same outcome. The person who tries to build outside the permission structure of the controlling infrastructure gets dealt with.
The difference between China and America
In China the control is acknowledged. The party does not pretend to be a free market. It does not claim to be a democracy while suppressing candidates and controlling media. It is openly authoritarian and makes no apology for it.
In America the control is hidden behind the language of free markets, free speech, and democratic participation. The platforms claim to be neutral infrastructure while suppressing specific voices. The banks claim to be making business decisions while denying accounts to candidates whose platforms threaten them. The media claims to be independent while being owned by government contractors and political allies of the administration.
The Chinese model is honest about what it is. The American model is more dangerous because it is not.
What the solution is not
The solution is not to become China. State ownership of platforms, state control of media, government direction of the economy — that is the problem, not the answer.
The solution is what the Constitution was designed to provide and what concentrated private power has systematically dismantled: genuine competition, genuine press freedom, genuine political participation, and genuine separation between the people who hold economic power and the people who hold government power.
No single person should own the communication platform, the defense contractor, the electric vehicle company, and have a formal government role simultaneously. No company should own both the cloud infrastructure the government runs on and the newspaper that covers that government. No industry should be able to deny banking services to a candidate whose platform threatens it.
These are not radical proposals. They are the basic conditions of a functioning republic. They existed within living memory. They were dismantled gradually, acquisition by acquisition, appointment by appointment, until the map of American infrastructure looks the way it looks today.
One percent of the population controlling the infrastructure that the other ninety nine percent depends on to live, work, communicate, and participate in democracy.
China figured this out decades ago. America is living it now and calling it freedom.
NewsOnScale is owned by AMILLI AI, Corp., founded by JJ Johnson. JJ Johnson is a declared 2028 presidential candidate. FEC filing: JJJOHNSON2028.