By 31.5.23
Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping (center) and Chinese and foreign naval officials applaud after a group photo during an event to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in Qingdao, in eastern China’s Shandong province, on April 23, 2019. (Mark Schiefelbein/AFP via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON—The United States lacks an effective tool to adequately combat widespread espionage and intellectual property theft being perpetrated by China’s communist regime, according to a U.S. Treasury Department official.
Despite years of competition and ongoing IP theft, the United States has not developed the tools required to target and prevent the continued transfer of sensitive U.S. technologies to China, according to Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Rosen.
“We currently assess we don’t have an effective tool to target the money and sophistication with know-how that goes into these sensitive and most critical technologies into countries of concern,” Rosen said during a May 31 hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.
“We risk leaving a gap in terms of some of our national security concerns,” he said.<
Rosen added that the Biden administration was committed to “zealously” defending U.S. security interests, and would prioritize those interests over economic development if necessary, but required more tools to do so.
“The United States will secure our interests and those of our allies and partners,” Rosen said.
“We will not compromise on national security concerns, even when they force trade-offs with economic interests.”
Rosen’s remarks confirm expert testimony delivered to Congress last year, which stated that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engaged in anti-competitive and anti-free market practices on a global scale, and that the United States lacks adequate non-security tools to defend its interests.
Policies That Benefited Corporate Profits
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the committee chair, said that the United States had fostered a system of policies over the course of several decades that had strengthened China at the expense of the American people. The nation’s current struggles to counter China, he said, are owed to policies that benefited corporate profits instead of American well-being.
“For far too long, our policy around China catered to multinational corporations and failed working families. It destroyed local communities, it eroded our manufacturing base and international competitiveness,” Brown said.
Brown added that U.S. policymakers “knew” corporations would terminate millions of U.S. jobs in favor of dirt cheap labor in China, but still granted the regime permanent most-favored trade status in the 1990s. Since then, he said, consecutive administrations had failed to correct the imbalance in China’s favor.
As such, he said, the “risks posed by the Chinese Communist Party” demanded immediate action.
“We all agree China is a real and growing threat. Our committee must play a leadership role in countering that threat,” Brown said.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), ranking member of the committee, agreed with the assessment, but warned that the United States was “perversely encouraging” companies to build in China while discouraging business at home due to excessive regulations.
While IP theft, unfair trade practices, and other efforts to erode American innovation were a threat, Scott said, the United States must also do more to compel tech companies to build their operations in the United States instead of transferring them to China.
“There should never be a world where a company finds China easier to do business [with], or a better business environment,” he said. “Efforts to advance national security will never succeed if the government undermines the economic security and economic opportunities of everyday Americans.”
Hi, EvRe.
The United States has never been isolated from the rest of the world, especially in the area of sharing technology. Remember the Manhattan Project during WWII, which attracted scientists from all over Europe (including Albert Einstein). After the war, we acquired the German rocket scientist Werner Von Braun, who became one of the founders of our space program.
By the 1980s, the flow of technology began flowing the other direction, to places like Japan. In the late 1970s, the university where I studied was replete with grad students and postdocs from places like Egypt, Thailand and Iran. In the mid-80s, I worked alongside a Taiwanese man, and later researched alongside a Communist Chinese fellow. Since then, graduate schools in the US were overwhelmingly from overseas: China, Korea, France, Poland… American students by that time were not very interested in science; they went into business and finance, where the “easy money” was.
Of course, bankers and investors have no loyalty except for money. The advance of globalism in finance and politics, IMO, was probably the result of world peace after WWII, not exceptional greed and vice. Peace, in fact, can probably be as destructive to society as war, just in different ways.
It was profitable for Joe Biden, to entice Putin into his latest Ukrainian adventure; and it’s profitable to Putin to prolong the war.
Back to technology, the more the Chinese Communists rely on patent-jumping and stealing ideas from others, the more behind they will fall economically. True economic growth is driven by innovation and freedom.
US corporations who want to do business in China are the proximate cause, since doing business in China means that China has access to their IP. So the billionaires getting rich in China have made the CCP rich by allowing them to steal American Intellectual property, benefitting the CCP at the expense of all Americans.
I don’t think it is possible to prevent American businessmen from doing business in China. What we need are policies that make it more profitable to do business in the USA. The big problem with that is that labor costs and regulatory costs are much higher in the US than in China. Which party is responsible for those costs? It is the uniparty in Washington DC that gets paid to support laws that drive up labor costs and increase regulations. They are paid an excellent government salary and have a great health care plan, and on top of that they are paid by donors to support policies that benefit China at the expense of the US.
Starting under Clinton, NAFTA and other trade deals sent US manufacturing overseas and to Mexico, hollowing out the manufacturing base of our economy which had made our economy the strongest in the world by the end of World War II. These globalist trade deals destroyed the economic growth engine, leaving the US with high tech jobs, financial, and service sector jobs which cannot sustain an economy of our size.
Trump made our country energy independent for the first time in our history, but Biden destroyed that on his first day in office.
Years of Marxist indoctrination and dumbing down in our public school systems and universities have led to a generation of Americans who do not know history, lack competitive math skills, struggle to write an essay and are willing to comply with any and all Marxist normalization of sexual perversions, not to mention ready compliance with any and all vaccine mandates.
Eight years of Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America have led to a US government weaponized against innocent American citizens who disagree with Marxist doctrine. The leftist radicals of the ’60s are in control of the federal bureaucracy, the Intelligence Community, the FBI, the DOJ, and the legal community writ large. When Marxists riot and burn and loot cities they are considered peaceful protests. When patriots meet to protest election fraud, they are jailed without due process and still in the gulag to this day.
I think it is an open question as to whether or not our current political system is fixable. Everything about it is broken: our media, the public health agencies, the medical establishment, Congress which is a Potemkin village spending money like a drunken sailor, our educational system, our elections: All on a Marxist-Globalist glide path.
Another issue is that of evil: those in government that made it quasi legal to use a bioweapon on its people knowing well in advance that it was a weapon, and making sure to prevent Americans from benefitting from safe, alternative treatments for a respiratory virus. In addition the DOD labeled it a military countermeasure which was under not a single regulatory requirement, and was not licensed by the FDA. As a military countermeasure, it was not classified as a drug. It was called a “vaccine,” but it neither provided immunity from infection nor prevented transmission. It was simply a bioweapon for the purpose of eugenics. This bioweapon was used around the world, and as such is genocide, and yet the genocide continues as the US and allied media around the world continue to demand that the world get “vaccinated.” In addition they are pursuing the use of this mRNA bioweapon in the food supply.
It is difficult to wrap one’s mind around the degree of perversion required for a person to think the use of this bioweapon was/is a good idea.
Just as few could imagine the horrors Hitler would eventually bring about, it is extremely difficult for relatively normal people to imagine what psychopaths are planning.
Where is hope to be found?
Hope is found through a relationship with God, and the other love relationships in our lives. We must strive to find other Americans who share our values and unite to make a better future.