An excerpt from my new book, “The New Art of War: China’s Deep Strategy Inside the United States.” (Published by Bricktower Press and available soon on Amazon and in book stores.)
“We learned a lesson from President George H.W. Bush’s Structural Impediments Initiative in the late 1980s. These talks were aimed at reducing the American trade deficit with Japan. The American argument was that it was not tariffs that discouraged Japanese from buying more American products. It was the keiretsu system in which large companies were linked with each other and with smaller companies through stock-holdings and other long-term relationships. They controlled the distribution channels for goods, which made it more difficult for the Americans to break in.
“The talks never succeeded because the U.S. government was asking the Japanese to give up the heart of their economic model. And it had considerable clout. We wrote the Japanese constitution after World War II and still had 50,000 American soldiers stationed there. We had twice as large a population, including a larger market. And the country depended on the United States for protection from both China and North Korea. But the Japanese never budged on the structural impediments. It was just how their economy worked. We were trying to change how they organized themselves as a people.
“We have far less clout today with China. We don’t have any military forces on their soil and they have a population more than four times larger than ours. We had no involvement in developing their form of government. There is no chance that China is going to give up on its technology ambitions because it regards the acquisition and development of key technologies as essential to its rise to power. Technology power is commercial power is national power. Backing down would be a humiliation for President Xi.
“The American government has not yet faced up to this central reality. President Trump’s negotiators seem to believe that tariffs will force the Chinese government to change its technological course, that somehow it will “fold” under the pressure. But if you understand the history, you know the Chinese party-state will not back down and cannot. China’s bid for technology is non-negotiable. If the government were to back down, it would allow the Chinese nation to be subjected to the same policy of “containment” that the United States used against the Soviet Union.
“Thus, the hacking is going to continue and the economic espionage is going to continue, as well as the other patterns of involvement in the fabric of American life. The patterns may shift but will not be voluntarily halted. Xi may agree to delay some elements of his Made in China 2025 plan and ease some pressures on U.S. companies. He may agree to purchase more American goods. But the Chinese government’s fundamental goals will remain in place as long as Xi is in power, which could easily mean five or 10 years or longer. “The attempts to acquire foreign technology will continue, though the methods will shift,” Derek Scissors, the resident China expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington told me.
I”f the China government’s deep game cannot be negotiated away, the burden of adjustment falls on us. There has been a spectacular void in the commentary on what the United States must do to confront China’s ambitions inside our country.”
Tomorrow: my solutions
