WASHINGTON—China’s communist regime seeks to dominate critical technological sectors in order to upend the global order and undermine the democratic way of life, according to a former White House official.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, is leveraging economic policies to foster illiberalism on a global scale, according to former national security adviser Robert O’Brien.

“The [CCP] are relentless in trying to change the way that we live our lives,” Mr. O’Brien said during an Aug. 2 talk at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.

“They’re trying to change the liberty [we have], to change the way we live, and to change the way the world is organized. And that’s dangerous.”

Mr. O’Brien said that the CCP regime was operating “across every region of the world,” seeking to uproot the influence of democratic nations and establish diplomatic and economic means of coercing smaller countries.

CCP Wants ‘Win-Lose’ Competition

Despite the regime’s much-touted claims to the contrary, Mr. O’Brien said that the CCP fundamentally seeks a “win-lose” competition in which its communist authoritarianism is exported worldwide by destroying liberal market economies.

“They talk about ‘win-win,’ but in reality, it’s ‘win-lose.’ China wins, and everyone else loses,” Mr. O’Brien said.

“In [CCP General Secretary] Xi Jinping’s eyes, the only way China can win is if everyone else loses.”

To that end, Mr. O’Brien said that the United States would need to continue fostering innovation and cooperation at home and with its allies, leveraging its global partnerships while the CCP’s predatory policies slowly undermined international faith in China.

“One of America’s greatest advantages ... is that we have real allies, and when you look at it, China doesn’t have real allies,” Mr. O’Brien said.

“They buy allies, they rent allies, but they don’t have real allies. We have allies in America. We have allies that are like-minded and share our values and share our beliefs in liberty, the rule of law, and open markets.”

The United States’ continued fostering of “innovation and creativity,” Mr. O’brien said, would be vital to ensuring that the West—a term Mr. O’Brien uses to refer to all democratic nations—emerges victorious over the CCP.

“Freedom breeds this entrepreneurial spirit,” Mr. O’Brien said.

“I think in the free world, in the West, our strongest area is innovation, entrepreneurship, [and] new ideas … I think we can maintain our advantage through innovation.”

US Companies Support China Despite IP Theft

Still, Mr. O’Brien warned, the competition is far from over. The CCP regime is engaged in a whole-of-society effort to systematically steal American intellectual property (IP) that the FBI has described as “one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.”

“The [CCP] have literally stolen trillions of dollars from us,” Mr. O’Brien said.

“This is a competition about whose way of life is going to rule.”

Indeed, despite years of competition and ongoing IP theft, the United States has not developed the tools required to prevent the continued transfer of sensitive U.S. technologies to China, according to Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Rosen.

“We currently assess we don’t have an effective tool to target the money and sophistication with know-how that goes into these sensitive and most critical technologies into countries of concern,” Mr. Rosen said during a May 31 hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

“We risk leaving a gap in terms of some of our national security concerns,” he said.

Mr. Rosen added that the Biden administration was committed to “zealously” defending U.S. security interests and would prioritize those interests over economic development if necessary, but required more resources to do so.

Mr. Rosen's remarks confirmed expert testimony delivered to Congress last year, which stated that the CCP is engaged in anti-competitive and anti-free market practices on a global scale and that the United States lacks adequate non-security tools to defend its interests.

Similarly, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the committee chair, said the United States had fostered a system of policies over several decades that had strengthened China at the expense of the American people.

The nation’s current struggles to counter China, he said, are owed to policies that benefited corporate profits instead of Americans' well-being, and which allow U.S. venture capital firms to support the CCP’s military modernization at U.S. expense.

Mr. Brown added that U.S. policymakers “knew” corporations would terminate millions of U.S. jobs in favor of dirt-cheap labor in China but still granted the regime permanent most-favored-nation trade status in the 1990s. Since then, he said, consecutive administrations had failed to correct the imbalance in China's favor.

“For far too long, our policy around China catered to multinational corporations and failed working families,” Mr. Brown said. “It destroyed local communities; it eroded our manufacturing base and international competitiveness.”