To the editors:
I would like to commend H.R. McMaster for his excellent article, What China Wants. He blended together the various threads of what emerges as a global competition of systems and values. The emerging U.S.-Chinese competition goes beyond trade issues. It touches on control of Information Technology platforms and telecommunications systems. It touches on military strategy. And it touches on bribing foreign leaders and helping them subdue their opponents. These are the values that China is promulgating—bribery, secrecy and control—precisely the opposite of the values that the United States has traditionally espoused.
One element of the battle that Mr. McMaster did not sufficiently explore is the need for more cooperation between American chief executive officers and the U.S. government in halting the massive hacking of the U.S. computer system and the systematic recruitment of Chinese nationals and others in U.S. laboratories working with the most advanced technologies. Heretodate, CEOs have believed their mission has been to make money, quarter after quarter, on behalf of their various constituents. They have not believed they play a role in national security. That was the government’s job.
But clearly the penetration of U.S. cloud computing systems, achieved by the Tianjin-based APT group that Mr. McMaster mentioned, has sweeping security implications. U.S. companies must dramatically increase their spending on defending the American computer infrastructure even if it affects their earnings in the short term. In addition, more companies need to follow General Electric’s lead in working with the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to track and arrest people recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security to steal technology. Too many CEOs have been reluctant to work with federal authorities because they feared public disclosure, which would hurt their share price, or they feared a negative reaction from the Chinese government. Mr. McMaster is also right that CEOs and the government should work together, in ways that are in keeping with American values, to dramatically accelerate America’s development of 5G telecommunications capabilities.
In short, we need a come-to-Jesus moment in which government and business leaders recognize we must make our system better able to compete against the increasingly monolithic Chinese system. It is a system-as-a-whole challenge on a global scale.
William J. Holstein
Author, “The New Art of War: China’s Deep Strategy Inside the United States.” (2019)
