But we need to go deeper. The challenge that China presents is not simply political, or economic, or military—it is, at the extreme, civilizational. China is advancing a new model of rule, a new model of how human beings can and ought to live together. That model is not only different from ours; it could be fatal to it. We need to recognize this, and square up to it.

So far, we’ve responded incoherently.

While political leaders have begun to discuss China’s various abuses, many corporate leaders continue to ingratiate themselves to Beijing. In October, the National Basketball Association capitulated to Chinese censors, rather than stand by one of the league’s general managers who tweeted support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters. If American companies want access to China’s enormous consumer base, then they have to comply with Beijing’s demands. American companies are no longer exporting American values into China; rather, China is now using American companies to enforce its own tenets here at home. If the NBA is willing to order one of its employees to shut his mouth in Houston because there’s money to be made in Shanghai, whose “National” Basketball Association is it?

Derek Thompson: The NBA-China disaster is a stress test for capitalism

And the NBA is far from alone. Tech companies have worked on censorship tools for Chinese use—projects that, given China’s penchant for intellectual-property theft, are more likely to threaten those companies’ security than the Communist Party’s. A number of American companies are clamoring for federal permission to export their wares to the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, even after that outfit and dozens of its affiliates were rightly added to the Department of Commerce’s Entity List in May. Huawei is a stalking horse for one of Beijing’s other key exports, espionage, but its would-be suppliers either do not understand, or do not care.

If the short-term transnationalism that Beijing offers largely defines the current status quo, we need to understand the long-term implications of the CCP’s efforts to cow or even co-opt the Fortune 500.

What we are lacking is a common vision that can guide American decision making at every level, in every sector, from the halls of Congress to corporate boardrooms. We need a common identity that can ground common purposes. We don’t—and let’s be absolutely unmistakable about this—need an imposition from on high; we don’t need our own “Xi Jinping Thought.” Instead, we need to rediscover precisely what joins us together in liberty and national solidarity, the principles that distinguish us from the coercive vision of the apparatchiks abroad.

The first and most essential principle is this: The United States is committed to the inviolable and inherent dignity of every human being. We continue to hold to the American creed written in our Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. The Chinese government believes no such thing. It will run roughshod over the basic mandates of justice, if doing so serves the agenda of the party—whether that means prohibiting families from having more than one child, or harvesting organs from Falun Gong prisoners to be sold to the wealthy, as an independent panel recently alleged. The catalog of China’s grave human-rights abuses grows every day, stretching from Xinjiang in the northwest to Hong Kong in the southeast.