Over a month ago, when criticism of China began to rise over how it has handled the Wuhan Flu as a global citizen, there were two immediate responses.
First the Chinese Communist Party went on a global propaganda tear, firing off all sorts of accusations, particularly at the USA.
Second, the usual suspects began to jump up and down about how this was all just the Trump administration trying to deflect attention from American dead and dying. I note that the Chinese propaganda apparat is cleverer than the clunking old Soviets and they have eagerly taken up this angle as well so that the one side reinforces the other.
But in fact Trump has been hammering the idea that the USA is too dependent upon China since the start of his campaign in 2015. I admit I rolled my eyes at this because he was saying the same thing about Japan back in the late 1980’s, and we know how that turned out. What most people have missed however is that Japan never had the sort of global geopolitical goals that the Chinese Communist Party has, nor did it ever appear to turn its economic links into international political leverage as the CCP has, with its One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative being the most obvious.
China’s IP (intellectual property) theft, according to an investigation led by Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, is costing the U.S. “between $225 billion and $600 billion annually.” As far back as November 2015 The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported that China’s hacking was costing U.S. companies $360 billion per year.
But the Bush and Obama administrations decided to overlook China’s duplicity in this area and others for the sake of appeasing both the Chinese government and U.S. business organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce, whose members didn’t want to lose access to China’s “fast-growing consumer market or to the country’s cheap labor.”
However, with the Wuhan Flu and their propaganda campaign around it, plus the threats they’ve made, they appear to have pushed it too far because the US blowback is bipartisan:
A Harris poll released on April 6 found that 77 percent of the US population believes China is to blame for the pandemic.
Threats? Well try this on. On March 4 an article titled “Be Bold: The World Owes China a Thank You”, was published in China’s state-run Xinhua news service and amidst all the usual propaganda tropes it noted that China has leverage over the U.S. and Europe because it can restrict the supply of medicines that have been outsourced to China. Specifically the USA could be “plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus.”
Frankly I thought this was just the usual boasting bullshit one expects from Communists, but it turns out to be true:
Eighty percent of America’s “active pharmaceutical ingredients” comes from abroad, primarily from China (and India); 45% of the penicillin used in the country is Chinese-made; as is nearly 100% of the ibuprofen. Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx,” testified last year to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission about this critical dependence.
“We can’t make penicillin anymore,” said Gibson. “The last penicillin plant in the United States closed in 2004.”
Other generic drugs whose key ingredients are manufactured in China include medicines for blood pressure medicine, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy and depression.
“Basically we’ve outsourced our entire industry to China,” retired Brig. Gen. John Adams told NBC News. “That is a strategic vulnerability.”
Adams, who during a 30-year career served as a military intelligence officer, a military attache in South Korea and deputy U.S. military representative to NATO, added that he believes China understood the implications as it was building a drug ingredients industry.
“I think they know exactly what they’re doing and they’re incredibly good strategists. They’re doing this, they select their industries for the future and they’ve got a plan.“
I doubt many people in the USA had any idea that China had such control.
So as a result of all these revelations, there has been some serious re-thinking about China going on. Here’s NeverTrumper, Andrew Sullivan, with this article, It’s Time for Conscious Uncoupling With China:
I’m not excusing Trump for his delusions, denial, and dithering — he is very much at fault — but the core source of the destruction was and is Beijing.
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For both Europe and America, the delusions that sustained the 21st-century engagement with China have begun to crack. We still don’t know how this virus emerged — and China hasn’t given any serious explanation of its origins. What we do know is that the regime punished and silenced those who wanted to sound the alarm as early as last December, and hid the true extent of the crisis from the rest of the world.
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The Chinese dictatorship is, in fact, through recklessness and cover-up, responsible for a global plague and tipping the entire world into a deep depression. It has also corrupted the World Health Organization, which was so desperate for China’s cooperation it swallowed Xi’s coronavirus lies and regurgitated them.
Sullivan gets to the heart of what a great many people, including me, have believed over the last twenty years. There were reservations, but to paraphrase Leo McGarry from The West Wing, was not engagement with China better than Cold War II?
I remember the old debate from the 1990s about how to engage China, and the persuasiveness of those who believed that economic prosperity would lead to greater democracy. COVID-19 is the final reminder of how wrong they actually were.
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Bringing a totalitarian country, which is herding its Muslim inhabitants into concentration camps, into the heart of the Western world was, in retrospect, a gamble that has not paid off.
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Integrating a communist dictatorship into a democratic world economy is a mug’s game. From now on, conscious decoupling is the order of the day.
From the moderate right is Michael Auslin, a fellow at the Hoover Institution:
Xi and the Communist Party care about dominating the propaganda war because the Wuhan virus has stood their nation on a razor’s edge. Xi’s own legitimacy is not merely at stake. His government is ferociously fighting to divert blame and attention, fearing that the world rightfully may utterly reassess modern China, from its technocratic prowess to its safety. Decades of a carefully curated global image may crumble if nations around the globe start paying attention to China’s lax public health care, incompetent and intrusive government, and generally less developed domestic conditions.
Xi’s fears are well founded, as a global reconsideration of China is long overdue. Legitimate criticisms and doubts about China’s governance and growth model were long suppressed by Chinese pressure and the willingness of many to buy into the Communist Party’s public line. Public shaming of foreign corporations, global influence operations, and “elite capture” — all are policies Beijing has deployed to maintain China’s public image. That carefully tended image is now cracked.
Elite capture? Sounds like New Zealand.
The idea that free trade would lead to a free society in China turned out to be wrong. Their Chinese Communist leadership simply used the wealth to build a 21st century military and security state the East German Stasi could only dream of.
The growing opposition to China is not just coming from the USA and Trump.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is said to be furious with China as he recovers from the coronavirus that nearly killed him. Not only is his government moving to permanently shut out China’s state-controlled electronic firm, Huawei, from the UK’s 5G networks, he has promised that there will be other consequences for China’s failure to share accurate and timely data on the deadly virus.
Meanwhile Japan’s government got the ball rolling in early April, announcing that it will start paying its companies to relocate out of China. If that surprises you then you probably haven’t paid much attention to the anti-Japanese propaganda campaign the CCP has whipped up over the last decade inside China, plus the power-play it pulled back in 2010, when it blocked the export of rare-earth minerals to Japan over territorial disputes in the East China Sea, although that’s just one of many.
Even Iran was not happy with China, with a Health spokesman saying that China’s statistics were “a bitter joke“, adding that, if Beijing said it got the coronavirus epidemic under control within two months of its outbreak, “one should really wonder [if it is true].” although Iranian leaders did their best to paper over the cracks.
Then there was Italy, one of the hardest hit nations in the EU, with the Northern regions of Lombardy and Tuscany showing the worst infection rates and death tolls. To the outside world this was a bit of a mystery at first, until it turned out that they were the two regions that had the most intimate contact with China. Tens of thousands of Chinese citizens worked in the areas and constantly flew between the two nations. It enabled things like Italy’s traditional shoe industry to survive the decline in the number of skilled Italian workers, control costs, and retain the precious “Made In Italy” stamp.
No wonder all the shoes and boots I looked at during our 2019 trip looked the same.
Italy had been warned about this by other EU members when it signed up to OBOR in 2019, the only G7 nation to do so. They probably felt they had no choice:
Italy’s economy has been struggling for two decades. It has seen three recessions in 10 years. Its unemployment rate stood at 10.3 percent, and its youth unemployment rate was 33 percent as of 2018. According to Marco Annunziata of Forbes, the living standards in Italy today are roughly the same as they were 20 years ago because very little growth has occurred.
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As part of the deal, Italy opened an array of sectors to Chinese investment, from infrastructure to transportation, including letting Chinese state-owned companies hold a stake in four major Italian ports. The deal gave communist China a foothold in the heart of Europe, but [Prime Minister] Conte downplayed it as “no big deal at all.”
How happy to do you think the governments of Spain, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands are after they recalled Chinese masks and testing kits when large batches were found to be defective? French President Emmanuel Macron has said the West’s acquiescence to China’s approach is “naïve” and in a visit to Beijing earlier this year said the new Silk Road China is anxious to rebuild “cannot be one-way.” France is also one of the EU nations hardest hit by the Wuhan Flu.
Not that the EU will be much use on this. A couple of weeks ago they were all set to release a report on the coronavirus pandemic:
An early draft of the report cited several key actions by communist China, including its slow initial cover-up and response, and its ongoing disinformation campaign to create confusion over its role and try blaming others including the United States.
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It cited Beijing’s efforts to curtail mentions of the virus’s origins in China, in part by blaming the United States for spreading the disease internationally. It noted that Beijing had criticized France as slow to respond to the pandemic and had pushed false accusations that French politicians used racist slurs against the head of the World Health Organization. The report also highlighted Russian efforts to promote false health information and sow distrust in Western institutions.
Russia eh? Something tells me we won’t be hearing much about that from the Russia Collusion screamers.
“The Chinese are already threatening with reactions if the report comes out,” Lutz Güllner, a European Union diplomat, wrote to colleagues on Tuesday in an email seen by The Times.
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The NYT reports that once China found out about the report, it made a few calls to see if Europe would delay and airbrush on Beijing’s behalf or not. This was a test of the EU’s resolve, as one European official noted. Would Europe stick to the facts, or would it wilt in the face of harsh words from foreign dictatorship?
I’ll take “fetal position” for €10, Alex. And so it came to be:
Worried about the repercussions, European officials first delayed and then rewrote the document in ways that diluted the focus on China, a vital trading partner — taking a very different approach than the confrontational stance adopted by the Trump administration.
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The sentence about China’s “global disinformation” campaign was removed, as was any mention of the dispute between China and France. Other language was toned down. And other facts got dropped into footnotes and appendices.
Turns out that one Ester Osorio, a senior aide to the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell, was the person who ordered the report delayed and altered. According to the report, Osorio also tried to cover her own tracks and although some EU officials are unhappy with the move…
“Such appeasement will set a terrible precedent and encourage similar coercion in the future,” an analyst, Monika Richter, wrote to her colleagues and supervisors in an email seen by The Times. She said that European Union diplomats were “self-censoring to appease the Chinese Communist Party.” She also wrote that it was a lie to claim that the document had not been scheduled for release.
… the fact is that the report is out there now, ready for use in China’s propaganda efforts.
European appeasement. This is my shocked face.
The trouble is that actually uncoupling from China in any way at all is going to be tough. It’s going to mean nations sucking up increased costs for re-establishing strategic industries – such as the production of basic pharmaceuticals: ordinary little things never thought of as strategic before. And we’re not talking about the same challenge as facing the clapped-out Soviets:
Soviet Communists told their most talented scientists, “Invent something new, and we’ll give you a medal, and maybe a dacha.” China says, “Invent something new, launch an Initial Public Offering, and become a billionaire.” By the end of 2019 there were 285 billionaires in China—including Alibaba’s Jack Ma, who, like many of his fellow billionaires, is a Communist Party member.
There are more Marxists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, than in all of China. I met a professed Marxist over dinner in Beijing a couple of years ago—a pleasant fellow who taught Marxist-Leninist doctrine at the Communist Party’s cadre school. His daughter had just graduated from a top American university; he asked if I could help her get a job on Wall Street.
I love that story. But still, as I have often pointed out, Marxism is merely used as a rationale for maintaining exactly the same type of centralised, bureaucratic, technocratic empire that has arisen in China repeatedly over the last 5000 years, with its “Mandate From Heaven“.
We aren’t facing drunken, corrupt Soviet bureaucrats, but a Mandarin elite cherry-picked from the brightest university graduates of the world’s largest country. America confronts something far more daunting than moth-eaten Marxism: a 5,000-year-old empire that is pragmatic, curious, adaptive, ruthless—and hungry. China’s current regime is cruel, but no crueler than the Qin dynasty that buried a million conscript laborers in the Great Wall. China was, and remains, utterly ruthless.
But the rest of the world still has considerable leverage since the links go both ways. On April 17, Chinese officials said their country’s economy shrank by 6.8 percent from January to March 2020, compared with one year ago. The business problems were already obvious, as outlined in this article last year.
This is the first economic contraction since Mao’s death in 1976 and a double blow for a nation that expects and needs 6%+ per annum growth. Things are likely to have got worse since then. There are numerous business reports detailing that even as businesses have re-started in China their order books are down drastically. How long that can go on before unemployment and general social unrest follow? China may think it can simply follow history and crush internal dissent, and it may well be able to, but that’s short-term; it has to have economic growth, so it may be more amenable to various Western demands now than before the virus.
And there is now no doubt that those demands are going to be made and those supply chain uncouplings are going to happen. The USA and EU nations are not going to allow themselves to be exposed like this again.
Where this leaves New Zealand is a tough question. Thanks to the FTA signed with China twenty years ago we are well plugged-in to that nation for both exports and imports. And we can expect no support from aging Lefties still stuck on their anti-US grudges. Although it has been pointed out that our export exposure to them is not so great that we can’t push back on them.
Still, China has already issued threats to Australia that it would stop importing things like beef and wine from them if they continue to push for an inquiry into the origin of the global coronavirus outbreak. We can expect the same treatment, although I doubt we’ll be pushing China for anything at all as both Labour and National seem to be part of that “elite capture” mentioned earlier, which is always the key to control of a colony. For all our bold talk of standing tall in the 1980’s and breaking free of Britain and the USA the fact is that we still have a colonial mindset, and China is the new empire.
on Maverick’s Jacket for Top Gun II
One suggestion: join with Australia in pushing for Taiwan’s entry into international bodies like the WHO, the UN and so forth. They’re a good democracy in a greater sense than just voting; having proved that they have institutions, including law and order, that are solidly based on democracy.
And they were more help to other nations in this crisis than China. China will explode with fury but nobody should believe their one country, two systems bullshit any longer, having seen what happened to Hong Kong, and I don’t see why the 1949 split should mean that China still has a claim on Taiwan.
Sadly, I don’t think New Zealand has the guts to do that, but if Adern decides to do so, she’ll have my vote.
No Minister 