Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
November 8th, 2019
In Martin Wolf’s June 4, 2019, essay in the Financial Times, called “The looming 100-year US-China conflict,” he calls for a blend of competition and cooperation.
In fact, that is what the National Security Strategy demands. Vice President Pence's Wilson Center speech also emphasized the need to work with the Chinese Communist Party. However, the notion that we can coax the CCP into a rules-based order is counter to everything the CCP says and does.
In Xi Jinping's speech to the Politburo in 2013, he talks about the triumph of socialism over capitalism. Document Number 9, released after that speech, emphasizes the danger democracy poses to the CCP's rule, and the need to fight it. The CCP's Constitution, arguably the true governing document for China, talks about the importance of the preservation of the party for China's return to preeminence. The outcome sought by the CCP is not different from other historical authoritarian regimes. What is different is the means. While military power has been used to subdue free peoples, the CCP seeks to influence through globalization and the Internet.
Today, as shown with the recent NBA example, economic, financial and informational ties are sufficient to suppress speech outside of China's borders. This process is enabled by Western policies built on the failed premise that open markets lead to wealth, and wealth leads to democracy.
Prior to joining the WTO, China faced a most favored nation (MFN) trading status vote in the Congress annually. Despite CCP pledges China would open up and reform, they are still not a market economy. Meanwhile, the lifting of tariffs meant more than 70,000 US factories closed. Productive capacity went to China, seeking higher profit margins driven by low labor and environmental protections. The annual MFN vote would have ensured that the CCP was forced to comply not only with market-based reforms, but also human rights transgressions. Meaning we would have the means to encourage the CCP to eschew concentration camps for Uighurs or the forced organ harvesting of prisoner's of conscience. At minimum western corporations would not aid repression.
Thus, instituting tariffs and requiring audit and transparency requirements of Chinese companies are not just needed to re-balance the global economy, but required to ensure multilateral institutions do not support human rights violators.
Not only has the West’s hubris about the eventual democratization of China led to its support for economic and human rights abuses, the openness has enabled the CCP to control the narrative.
Michael Bloomberg recently said Xi is not a dictator. Bloomberg’s failure to get the gist of the CCP’s 19th Party Congress, as well as the fact that my son's college professor believes China is a democracy, indicates how powerful the CCP has been in controlling the narrative about China through Western institutions. Cambridge University’s culling of the China Quarterly shows the CCP's ability to reshape our now increasingly digitized history. Martin’s solution and failed western policies are based on a vision of China propagated through Western hubris and CCP deception. It’s time to awaken and deal with the CCP as it is.
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