A group of prominent Americans active in U.S. policy toward China wrote this oped in the Washington Post on July 3, a date guaranteeing that the vast majority of Americans will never see it. Among them was Stapleton Roy, who was the acting ambassador to China when I was based in Beijing in 1981-82 for United Press International. The oped’s headline read, “China is Not an Enemy.”
This group of experts argues that there are forces within the Chinese leadership who want to guide China toward a responsible, non-confrontational role in the world and that the best way for the Americans to counter China’s government is to work with our allies.
I respectively submit that these experts are not looking at the facts. President Xi Jinping has surprised all of us by creating the most digitally advanced police state in the world and establishing himself as ruler for life. He has wiped out all visible resistance to his rule. As long as he is in power, the so-called “moderates” or “liberals” in the Chinese leadership have zero chance of prevailing.
Moreover, the Chinese party-state is exporting its principles around the world. It is supporting corruption, authoritarian rule and massive monitoring and suppression of governmental critics in dozens of countries. That is fundamentally at odds with the traditional American goal of seeing democracy take root. The current administration does not share that objective, but I am confident that the long-term trend will prevail.
China is also projecting military power in a way that is surprising us. Its militarization of islands in the South China Sea is just one piece of it. There are clear military implications of landing a spacecraft on the dark side of the moon and seeking to develop Artificial Intelligence, supercomputing and quantum computing. There is clearly a military and strategic aspect to Huawei’s rapid development of 5G wireless technology. these technologies are certainly far more important than the new aircraft carriers China is deploying.
Lastly, the Chinese government is directly involved in the massive theft of American technology here in the United States, as I document in “The New Art of War: China’s Deep Strategy In The United States,” available here. The Ministry of State Security is directly involved in large-scale hacking of America’s cloud computing system and directly involved in recruiting ethnic Chinese inside American companies to reveal technology secrets. There were two such cases at General Electric. The latest massive theft of intellectual property has hit Tesla.
The Chinese have redefined the concepts of “war” and “enemy.” They are vastly more sophisticated than we are when it comes to the types of conflict that can be waged. It’s true that we are deeply intertwined economically and that has had some positive impacts on corporate profits and on maintaining low consumer prices. We engage in tourism and educational exchanges. And we share a broad commitment to geopolitical stability.
But there are aspects of what China’s government is doing that pose a clear and direct danger to American interests. We don’t need to declare “war” on this “enemy” because that is an old-fashioned concept. But we need to get serious about halting their attacks on our Information and Communications Technology systems and halting their human penetration of U.S. companies and governmental institutions. And we need to get serious about accelerating our development of technologies that come out of our universities and research institutes. The Chinese are stealing many of those ideas, taking them to China, and trying to use government funding and the size of their market to develop and commercialize technologies faster than we can. That is not a wild assertion. It is documented, time and time again.
The authors of the oped are right in stating that many U.S. actions, such as tariffs, are “contributing directly to the downward spiral of relations.” Tariffs are the wrong instrument to be using. But there is a stunning absence of any real solutions in the oped. There is a vacuum in American policy toward China, which I try to address in the last part of my book. The traditional foreign policy approach is too narrow because China is here in America in a powerful way. We have to start what promises to be a long struggle here and now. We need our own Long March.
