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It has been a long journey to reach this moment …

  • In 1972, Nixon traveled to China
  • In 1973, the Philadelphia Orchestra became the first international orchestra to perform in China
  • In 1974, I began to study Mandarin at college
  • In 1976, Mao died (and the Cultural Revolution with him)
  • In 1978, Deng and the CCP began experimenting with economic reforms
  • In 1979, Carter normalized relations
  • In 1980, I traveled to the mainland for the first time
  • 1n 1982, at its 12th National Party Congress, China adopted economic reforms as its priority policy

Just this past week — forty years later at its 20th Party Congress — China under Xi has formally abandoned economic growth as its top priority for national development (along with the international partnerships on which that growth depended for trade, investment, access to capital markets and innovation) and prioritized instead “security” (with all the ideological baggage which that entails in Xi’s worldview).

Put simply, Xi has just crossed the Rubicon …

I wrote on Monday in Ideologues Meet Markets that I would share my considered view on the implications of the just concluded 20th National Party Congress after a few days of rumination and reflection. I am doing so now. Xi has just crossed the Rubicon. His move not only upends a forty-year trajectory of the most dynamic economic growth ever witnessed in the world, it threatens — more ominously — the foundations of the post-WWII international order and the unprecedented seventy-year run of (relative) peace the world has enjoyed at the global level.

An extremely well observed account of what this moment means is contained in the political economist Yuen Yuen Ang’s opinion piece in today’s New York Times. I reproduce below that piece in its entirety:

China’s Era of Reform Has Officially Ended

By Yuen Yuen Ang

Forty-four years ago, Deng Xiaoping kicked off the period of “reform and opening up” that transformed China from a poor, autarkic nation into an emerging global power.

President Xi Jinping officially ended that era last week. He emerged from the Chinese Communist Party’s congress in Beijing with unchallenged authority and plans for China that revolve around his obsession with control and security — even if that means harming the economy.

It’s a momentous change in outlook.

Deng Xiaoping’s strategy for China’s spectacular economic achievements had two main components. The first was a collective leadership arrangement within the Communist Party. Deng rejected Western-style democracy, but China’s tumultuous decades under Mao Zedong had taught him that one-man rule is dangerous. He and the party introduced partial checks and balances into politics at the highest level, including term limits. The second component was a single-minded pursuit of economic growth that, Deng famously declared, would be China’s “hard principle.” Officials throughout China dove headlong into promoting growth at all costs — bringing prosperity but also corruption, inequality and heavy industrial pollution.

Last week in Beijing, Mr. Xi dismantled those foundations. He ensured that he would remain paramount leader of China for a third term — if not for life — and packed the party’s leadership with loyalists while heavily prioritizing national security over the pursuit of economic growth.

In his speech to the party congress at the Great Hall of the People on Oct. 16, he mentioned “security” significantly more often than “economy,” a major break with precedent. He went further, declaring unambiguously, “National security is the bedrock of national rejuvenation, and social stability is a prerequisite for building a strong and prosperous China.”

In Chinese politics, small changes in wording can herald big shifts in ideology and policy. If there were any remaining doubts about Mr. Xi’s intentions, he dispelled them by vowing that China would stick to its zero-Covid policy, “without wavering.” His government’s approach to the pandemic, a public health policy in name, is in reality the most powerful security tool devised by the Communist Party, restricting access to the country and controlling who can go where, underpinned by tracking apps that citizens and visitors must have on their smartphones.

For observers long accustomed to Deng’s growth-first ethos, Mr. Xi’s policy choice is mind-boggling. The Covid controls are angering citizens, crippling China’s economy, decimating domestic consumption, disrupting manufacturing and logistics, and repelling foreign and local investors alike.

Why is the most powerful Chinese leader in decades so obsessed with security and domestic control that he would sacrifice the economy? The answer lies in an array of domestic and foreign challenges, some worsened by Mr. Xi’s own policy choices.

Politically, he probably fears the proverbial knife in the back after making enemies through a decade-long anti-corruption campaign in which thousands of officials — possibly including potential political rivals — were punished and is doubling down on repression out of his instinct for self-preservation.

On the economic front, he faces smoldering crises, including an economy that is slowing sharply, a property sector meltdown and record-breaking youth unemployment. These problems have been exacerbated by the Covid controls and by Mr. Xi’s “common prosperity” campaign — a strategy for narrowing inequality and addressing monopolistic behavior by big tech firms and other private companies, which was punctuated by an abrupt and sweeping regulatory crackdown last year that has alarmed investors. The market backlash was intense: Within months, more than a trillion dollars in value at many of China’s most innovative companies evaporated.

On foreign policy, Mr. Xi has projected an ambition to challenge American primacy. The Trump administration’s chaotic handling of the pandemic prompted Mr. Xi to boast that “the East is rising and the West is declining.” But his triumphalism was premature. China is far from an even match with the United States in economic, military or technological power. And while American democracy is in crisis, the United States remains strong, a true superpower and a free country able to criticize and renew itself. Mr. Xi criticizes the West for seeking to contain China, but his hubris and aggressive approach helped bring about this threat.

To be sure, Mr. Xi does not intend to completely abandon the capitalist success that rejuvenated China and brought global respect and influence. And to his credit, he has confronted serious problems that his predecessors swept under the rug, particularly corruption and economic inequality. His vision of a powerful China, respected on the global stage, is warranted given his country’s size and economic clout.

But addressing China’s myriad problems will require measured steps that Mr. Xi seems disinclined to take. Putting out fires in China’s economy must begin with relaxing Covid restrictions and importing more effective vaccines, something that his government has prevented. These won’t be miracle cures, but they are necessary first steps that will go a long way toward alleviating stress on China’s people and reassuring investors that his leadership team has not lost all sense.

Mr. Xi has plunged China into a vicious cycle: A hubristic and authoritarian leader, unaccountable to society and unchallenged even by his own advisers, makes poor policy choices, which add to his problems, exacerbating his fears of a revolt and leading to more repression.

The consequences of his decision to emphasize security over economic vibrancy will be global. China is the world’s second-largest economy and the biggest trading partner of dozens of countries. A prolonged economic slowdown in China will increase the risk of a global recession, with many countries sharing the pain. In the long run, there may be winners as China’s waning competitiveness hastens a shift in global supply chains to other emerging economies. But if China turns inward, it will lose. Chinese tech companies are already expanding overseas to compensate for a restrictive home environment.

China’s great capitalist revolution under Deng and his successors is now history. So is Mr. Xi’s first 10 years in office, when there was at least a minimal layer of checks on his power from moderate, non-loyalist officials. China under Mao and the former Soviet Union proved that absolute dictatorships fail miserably at making nations prosperous and strong. They bring only impoverishment and false security. Mr. Xi is likely to relearn those lessons in the coming years.

Yuen Yuen Ang (@yuenyuenang) is a political economist and the author of “Chinaʼs Gilded Age” and “How China Escaped the Poverty Trap.”

I’ll give my wrap on the conclusion of the 20th Party Congress in Beijing later in the week after some further digestion and rumination.

Meanwhile, here’s a graphic putting today’s market reaction to Xi’s consolidation of power into some context. Entirely different timelines and denouements but same implacable forces at work …

Founding of the PRC on October 1, 1949

Throughout WWII, the U.S., the Soviet Union and the Kuomintang (KMT) Party of China were formal allies. But in 1949, Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forced the KMT to flee to Taiwan. On October 1st 1949, Mao formally announced the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The strategic triangle shifted as the U.S. lost a putative (and highly authoritarian) KMT ally in China and the Soviet Union gained a Communist comrade-in-arms with the CPP.


Sino-Soviet Split 1956-1964

The chumminess of this 1958 photo of Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev belies the deep rifts — both ideological and geopolitical — which had been developing in the Sino-Soviet relationship since 1956. Despite efforts to patch over the differences, the divisions continued to grow until Mao announced the split in 1964 followed by a series of formal statements. Monolithic global Communism had ceased to exist.


Zhou Enlai Greets the Nixons after Air Force One Lands 2/21/1972

Fifty years ago today, Air Force One touched down in Beijing bringing President Nixon and the First Lady for their historic meeting with Mao Zedong. The Nixons’ visit to China lasted from February 21-28, 1972. It was then followed by years of rapprochement efforts — including the historic performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1973 — and culminated in the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China under President Carter in 1979. The Soviet Union was left out in the cold.


Xi & Putin seal partnership of “no limits” at 2022 Winter Olympics

Today — February 21, 2022 — Russia announced its formal recognition of two breakaway, largely Russian-speaking enclaves in eastern Ukraine. The post-WWII order of sovereignty, rule of law, and cooperation is being challenged. Two weeks earlier, Xi Jinping chose to support Putin’s Ukraine power-play, overturning decades of official “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence” policy. The U.S.-China-Russia ground has shifted yet again.


Looking back on these seventy-five years of U.S.-China-Soviet/Russia relations, I expect that I will always pause to reflect on February 21 as each year passes. February 21, 1972 was deeply promising. February 21, 2022 is deeply foreboding. In a professional sense, today’s date will likely be for me somewhat like what I feel personally as other calendar days each year remind me of my mother’s and father’s deaths (and of their lives). Artificial and arbitrary dates on a calendar which nonetheless carry deep and lasting human meaning and consequence.

On January 13th of this year, President Trump abruptly ordered the termination of the U.S.-China EcoPartnership Program. Seven days before leaving office and without notice, Trump turned the lights off on this 10-year old program, pulling the rug out from under 36 committed and on-going bi-national projects to lower carbon-emissions at global scale.

The Biden Administration is assessing its options for re-vitalizing, in some shape or form, this model of innovative and impactful public-private collaboration to put a dent in global greenhouse gas emissions. This might involve replication of the program to India. ReGen250 is already in the starting gate with a U.S. Mid-Atlantic/State of Maharashtra candidate program should that take shape, as is described on pages 8-9 of our article published last month in the peer-reviewed science journal Environmental Progress and Sustainable Energy.

In the meanwhile, we are pressing forward with unofficial support from the two U.S. Government agencies which ran the EcoPartnership program for ten years — the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Energy — on a purely private and sub-national basis. Our goal in China looking forward is to explore the possibility of expanding from a regional effort (low-carbon collaboration between the U.S.-Mid-Atlantic and the Jing-Jin-Ji (京津冀) region of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei Province to national scale.

How will we accomplish this without the direct support of the U.S. Government? The first step was to confirm the Biden Administration’s encouragement of trade with China in support of Paris Accord goals and then to renew our region-to-region BE Better program partnership with our primary partner in China, the TEDA EcoCenter. These steps were taken last quarter.

The next steps involve exploring prospects for the resumption of the Sino-U.S. Eco Park national-level opportunity with the Green Development League as outlined at the 2020 U.S.-China EcoPartnership Summit. (As described in detail in a prior post, the Green Development League comprises the 36 top-ranked NETDZs throughout China and the GDL Secretary-General is our original EcoPartnership partner (the TEDA EcoCenter and its Director Madame Yuyan Song).

As the exclusive U.S.-based working group member for the proposed Sino-U.S. Eco Park, China Partnership would leverage expertise and input from (1) our region-to-region BE Better program partners (experts in “energy-efficient, smart and healthy built environments” for industrial park users) as well as (2) our U.S.-China BEST Cities partners (with additional constituencies of support to include the U.S.-China Business Council, the U.S. Industry Advisory Board of the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center for Building Energy Efficiency (CERC-BEE), the National Governors Association, and the National League of Cities) in order to identify a comprehensive range of U.S. clean energy technologies and infrastructures from across eastern, central and western regions of the United States to be incorporated into the Sino-U.S. BE Better Eco Park model.

The primary impact of this milestone — CPGP’s formally joining the Green Development League’s  working group for design of a Sino-U.S. Eco Park with scalability and replicability to multiple locations throughout China — is literally “to put the U.S. on the map” alongside eight other similar International Eco Parks already functioning in China under PRC Ministry of Commerce auspices. These eight other Eco Park projects represent mostly Sino-European collaborations (e.g., Sino-German Eco Park, Sino-Swiss Zhenjiang Eco Park, Sino-Austrian Eco Park, Sino-Finland Beijing Eco Park) and, to date, none represents a Sino-U.S. collaboration. The CPGP/U.S.-China BEST Cities model was selected, following the March 27, 2018 deadline for application, due to its unique structure of open collaboration designed to introduce U.S. urban clean energy infrastructures and technologies to TEDA and the 35 other top National Economic-technological Development Zones (NETDZ) in the Green Development League.

Using comparables drawn from the realized, real-world experience of the Sino-German Eco Park in Dalian but adjusted to account for the relatively greater GDP of the U.S., a Sino-U.S. BE Better Eco Park leveraging our EcoPartnership’s platform of energy-efficient, smart, healthy built environment and clean manufacturing for industrial park application should reasonably be expected to realize within its initial 5 years:

• As many as 300 signed project agreements (with nearly 60% of those either in production or under construction during that timeframe) representing total investment of 100 billion RMB (approx. USD 15 billion at today’s exchange rate)

• As many as 90 of these projects would be expected to fall in the high-end manufacturing and new energy field with total investment of 67.5 billion RMB (approx. USD 10 billion at today’s exchange rate)

• As many as 80 of these projects would be expected to fall in the advanced services sector with total investment of 35 billion RMB (approx. USD 5 billion at today’s exchange rate)

We are now actively exploring the most practical route for realizing this goal which would involve resumption, post-Trump Administration, of our primary partnership model with (a) TEDA, (b) the 36 GDLs and (c) the 219 NETDZs. Additionally, we have recourse to a secondary partnership model focused on the Jing-Jin-Ji/Xiongan New Area mega-development project. 

With respect to the 35-year macroeconomic development effort ushered in by Deng Xiaoping and the Shenzhen and Pudong macro-development projects, Xiongan has both continuities and distinctive differences. One similarity is the size envisioned for the Xiongan New Area -– roughly 50% bigger than Pudong (east of Shanghai) and slightly larger than Shenzhen (to the north of Hong Kong). While Xiongan can be thought of as culminating the coastal progression of these macro-projects–- starting in the south with Shenzhen in the 1980s and moving to the central coast with Pudong in the 1990s -– the final, northern leg of this triad was wobbly at first. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao initially envisioned the third macro-project leg as being Binhai to the northeast of Tianjin. Post-2012, however, plans for Binhai lost most of their momentum and it was only with President Xi Jinping’s emergence in power that priority was shifted from Binhai to Xiongan. It is more in the discontinuities between Xiongan and the earlier Shenzhen and Pudong macro-projects that Xiongan’s significance can best be understood. The first 30 years of the PRC’s post-Cultural Revolution industrial development was based on a high-carbon model. (This is frequently referred to in China by the phrase 先污染后治理 meaning “pollute first, clean up (or remediate) later”). In contrast, the Xiongan industrial model championed by Xi Jinping focuses on a different set of values for the next 30-year-or-so phase of China’s development in the 21st century: the goals of (1) promoting and putting into practice low-carbon industrialization and sustainability innovations and (2) lessening social inequality and narrowing the gap between rich and poor in shared benefits of industrialization and economic development.

Last week, ReGen 250 — the 501c3 non-profit with which the TEA Collaborative is associated — celebrated its 10th Anniversary. To mark the occasion, it’s timely to cast an eye back and quickly survey the road traveled to fix where the TEA Collaborative stands today.

We’ll cover the tech perspective, the energy & environment perspective and the PRC planning ambitions perspective in separate T-series, E-series and A-series posts this week.

Testifying at U.S. China Commission Hearings (2003)

My focus on technology issues, especially supply chain issues for advanced ICT (information and communications technology) products involving the U.S.-China-Taiwan triangle, was most intense prior to the founding of ReGen250 in 2011. Some highlights include:

  • Three-time Invited Congressional Commission Expert Witness at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s Public Hearings on Global Supply Chains and Cross-Straits Security Issues (109th108th, and 107th Sessions of the U.S. Congress)
  • Director and Head of Partnership Development, Asia at the World Economic Forum  (with strategic focus on ICT, Energy, Transportation, Finance industries)
  • Author of The Politics of Greater China’s Integration into the Global Info Tech Supply Chain in The Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 13, No. 40; and of Taiwan’s FTA Prospects from the Global IT Supply Chain Perspective in Economic Integration, Democratization and National Security in East Asia, edited by Peter C.Y. Chow
  • Green Team Leader on Cross-Straits Economics, U.S. Dept. of Defense/Defense Intelligence Agency Strategic Coercion Wargame convened by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)
  • Invited Non-Governmental Expert Participant, Asian Scenario Seminar Game at the Army War College, Carlisle, PA
  • Co-organizer of The Role of Taiwan in the Post-WTO Global Supply Chain Workshop at the 19th Modern Engineering & Technology Seminar
  • Official Host (“Ambassador”) for the Taiwan Delegation at World Congress on Information Technology XV in Austin TX
  • Featured Speaker & Seminar Consultant – RAND Corporation, MITRE Corporation
  • Keynote/Plenary Speaker at large scale media (Forbes, BusinessWeek, Reuters, The Economist Conference Group) and investor (Berkshire-Hathaway-themed 3rd Annual Global Investment Conference, China’s Financial Markets Conference, New York Cleantech Investors Forum, National Association of Business Economists/NABE) conferences
  • Moderator at Fabless Semiconductor Association and Wharton China Business Forum annual conference events
  • Advisor on Global Business Outreach, The Lauder Institute, University of Pennsylvania
  • Invited Think-tank Speaker: CSIS, AEI, Heritage, Brookings, etc

For the TEA Collaborative, this perspective has been brought to bear in a number of recent posts:

This are representative of the most consequential questions and challenges underlying U.S.-China relations at the present moment. They are at the core of the whole-of-government policy review towards China now being coordinated by Kurt Campbell and the National Security Council. Ironically, these issues were dismissed by the American Enterprise Institute when Ambassador Jim Lilley introduced me to AEI for a day-long series of interviews preparatory to a possible appointment back in 2002. AEI’s conclusion at the end of the day as their senior leadership explained their decision not to make an offer? These were all questions which the free market would sort out and there’s no role for AEI or policy makers to play. Ideologically consistent perhaps but hardly prescient.

President Biden’s first in-person appearance on the world stage included a tense but business-like meeting with Vladimir Putin, a NATO meeting in which NATO solidarity was vociferously reaffirmed and a meeting of G7 leaders in which the perceived threats of climate change and China both loomed large.

The final agreement announced at the conclusion of the G7 last Sunday featured two elements with direct bearing on China and, particularly, on China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI): a commitment to phase out coal-fired electricity generation and a revived commitment to provide $100 billion in green finance assistance to developing countries.  Both commitments were, however, long on symbolism and short on substance.

Today’s post looks at why the headlines for both announcements were printed in such large banner font, why the accompanying stories were so short in column-inch detail and why both stories serve to center on China at a meeting – involving the heads of state of the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Japan – where China is not represented.

The electricity generation commitment undertaken by the seven leaders was specifically that their governments would provide no new support for thermal coal power generation except in cases where carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology is deployed in tandem to neutralize the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced by coal-firing.  This undertaking supports a previous G7 commitment to halve emissions by 2030 (against a 2010 baseline) on the way to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

The green finance commitment announced announced Sunday – to provide $100 billion annually to help developing countries decarbonize – was not in fact a new commitment but a reaffirmation of an earlier commitment which had lapsed during the Trump years. It was rolled out on Sunday with a new name – the Build Back Better World Initiative – but with no new funding attached.

Seen from a global perspective, both commitments are intended as a direct response to China and its Belt and Road Initiative.  China’s trajectory of domestic high-growth has resulted in it recently surpassing the GHG emissions of the entire developed world combined, according to a recent report by the Rhodium Group.  Compounding this unfavorable trend, China continues to support its Big Coal industry by encouraging exports of coal-fired power generation equipment to its less developed BRI partner countries.  The G7’s electricity generation commitment is therefore intended to draw a sharp contrast in climate change global leadership between the G7 group of democracies and the China’s competing, more authoritarian model.  Similarly, the green financing commitment is intended as an alternative pool of financing for developing countries to draw on separate from Chinese government lending and the BRI-focused Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

So what accounts for the splashy headline but dearth of detail?  Two factors. The first is the very evident desire of the other six countries to welcome the U.S., post-Trump, “back into the club” by explicitly amplifying in the international arena President Biden’s domestic Build Back Better theme; and, more importantly, by presenting a show of implicit support for Biden’s “Summit of the Democracies” strategy for countering China. In short, the symbolism was more important than the actual substance for achieving this goal.

Hammering out the details of the power generation agreement and expanding on the scope of the green finance commitment eluded the G7 leaders at this meeting due to a lack of confidence, especially among the three leaders from Continental Europe, that detailed and expanded agreement will stick. There are three levels of doubt contributing to this lack of confidence.  In order of ascending importance, there is:

  • Uncertainty over how Biden and his National Security Council deputies Kurt Campbell and John Kerry are going to square heightened competition with China in the technology space with attempted renewal of cooperation with China in addressing climate change;
  • Doubt over the ability of the Administration to get its proposals through a closely-divided and highly-partisan Congress; and
  • Concern that the American public’s fling with climate science denial and Trumpian America First thinking might not be a one-time affair and could come to the fore again in the 2022 mid-term election and the 2024 Presidential election.

Given these doubts, any effort to provide substantive detail for the power generation agreement and to expand the green financing agreement would have been prone to failure and could have undercut the paramount goal of projecting renewed G7 solidarity and democratic unity.  Looked at from another angle, this result shows how much effort and hard work will be required to reestablish the global momentum toward 2050 climate goals following Trump’s decision to pull America out from the Paris Accord Conference of Parties (COP) process.

Volume 2, Number 3 in Global TECHtonics: U.S./China Fault-line series

A U.S.-led initiative to reach out to China and to welcome it into the community of Western nations began with President Nixon trip to Beijing in February 1972.  Orchestrated by Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Advisor at the time, the trip was a brilliant Cold War gambit to exploit the growing rift between Moscow and Beijing. The trip kicked off a seven-year process of “normalizing” relations between the West and “the sleeping dragon” of Asia and, in so doing, divided the Soviet bloc. Through almost half-a-century and a bipartisan succession of Presidents, the effort to engage with China continued as that country woke from its Cultural Revolution nightmare and began to rise up, shaking the world as it did so.

February 1972 was the Year of the Rat (Water Element) in the Chinese zodiac.  Forty-eight years later we are again in the Year of the Rat under the Metal Element.  In Chinese traditional thinking, we have gone from a time of suppleness and fluidity to a time of hardness and intransigence.  In the minds of most Western observers, we have passed from a strategic engagement with China to, under President Trump, a time of open competition on the world stage and strategic disengagement (“de-coupling”) in the technology arena.

This post will save for another time the broader discussion about how and why this shift came about other than to make three general, even obvious, points.  First, there was undoubtedly a measure of optimistic naïveté in the West in assuming China’s willingness to dutifully assume the role of a ‘responsible stakeholder’ in the post-WWII world order.  If the Chinese had conceived of their nation as only having been born in 1949, assuming the mantle of responsible Pax Americana stakeholder might have fit more comfortably. As it was, Chinese conceived the People’s Republic of China as the heir to a Chinese polity which had been the dominant economy in the world for sixteen of the previous eighteen centuries.  They weren’t predisposed to simply adopting some newcomer’s rules and norms as to how China should conduct itself on the world stage. Second, there has undoubtedly been tactical overreach and ill-advised swaggering by President Xi Jinping since his triumphalist speech at the 19th Party Congress in September 2017.  U.S.-China relations would undoubtedly be on a more stable track today had Xi Jinping played his cards differently, following suit more with Deng Xiaoping’s opening bid of “keeping a low profile (hiding one’s capacity) and biding one’s time” (韜光養晦、有所作為) rather than flashing his Made in China 2025 card so conspicuously. It can be argued that it’s better from the U.S. standpoint for this “world order competition” to be out in the open. Third, the horse is definitely out of the barn.  No U.S. Administration is going to try to get that horse back on the 1972-2017 normalization track. The world has changed and what is needed is a U.S. Administration which recognizes real challenges from China but does not exaggerate them and which marshals the resources to address those challenges in an efficient and effective way, rather than wastefully and non-productively.

The remainder of this post uses last week’s The Four Levels of Risk post as a backdrop to a quick sketch outlining just how wasteful and ineffective the Trump Administration’s policy of technology de-coupling from China is becoming.  I’ll do this sketch with three brushstrokes – the view from U.S. boardrooms, the view from the cultural sidelines and the view from history.

 

The View from U.S. Boardrooms

A CNBC.com article by Arjun Kharpal published on June 4, 2019 made no reference to the Tiananmen anniversary but did point out that the Trump Administration’s Huawei policy was quickly hoisted on its own petard  – failing to get allies to broaden the campaign but leading to a marked acceleration of China’s efforts to develop its own semiconductor industry to supplant U.S. semiconductor supply in the Chinese market and, eventually, in world markets.  “The Huawei incident has indeed stimulated the development of China’s domestic chip industry,” Gu Wenjun, analyst at China-based semiconductor research firm ICWise, told CNBC by email” wrote Kharpal at the time. Now, one year later, Trump Administration policy is digging this hole deeper and at a faster pace:

  • Qualcomm is reported to have lost current orders worth as much as $8 billion as a result of the Trump Administration’s May 2020 tightening of trade restrictions imposed against Huawei. The new regulations block all chipmakers that use U.S.-made equipment or software from producing chips for Huawei (though companies can apply for a license to continue supply)
  • Following the Trump Administration’s August 6th signing of an Executive Order banning transactions by U.S. companies with Tencent, the owner of the WeChat app, market research firms scrambled to assess the impact on Apple and its installed base of iPhones in the strategically vital Chinese market. The surveys all pointed to the same result – as many as 90% of iPhone users in China would drop the Apple product and switch to Android devices if the WeChat app were no longer available on their iPhones.
  • The same August 6th Executive Order targeted Bytedance, parent company to the massively popular TikTok app. Seasoned observers who are able to gauge the U.S.-side push-back against this action and know the sloppiness with which the Executive Order was drafted, expect an eventual climbdown by the Administration – if not before the November 3rd election, then shortly after it.

 

The View from the Cultural Sidelines

There are two culture wars raging – a partisan one in U.S. domestic politics and an international one between a suddenly tarnished U.S. model and a much-hyped “bright and shiny” new Chinese model.  The same dynamics at play with the COVID-19 pandemic are at play in the technology sphere.  Domestically, Trump works to energize his base with claims that China is the enemy and that his Administration’s COVID response and China de-coupling response are “the best” that any President could possibly do.  Front-line health workers and tech experts know that, in both cases, the claim lies far afield from the truth.

In China, the popular view cuts to the bone of Trump Administration posturing.  His new nickname is 建国 (Jiànguó), a popular name given by parents to their infants especially during the nationalistic years of the Cultural Revolution.  It means “Build the Country.”  In other words, Trump Administration policies are widely seen as accelerating the same nationalistically-driven Sputnik-type race to advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, robotics and the tech future which the policies ostensibly are meant to forestall.  Trump’s impulsive “Only I Can Fix It” approach playing to a grandstand of partisan supporters has made the challenge which Xi Jinping’s China presents the U.S. more acute.   An approach which takes measured and deliberate stock of that challenge and which aligns interests and works closely with the U.S. business community and international partners would be far more effective.  Pumping up nationalist sentiment in both the U.S. and China serves only to narrow options and increase risks of conflict spiraling.

 

The View from History

A pithy take on Trump’s approach to the U.S.-China technology challenge comes from a widely-respected former colleague who has decades of high-level experience with China from political, national security, economic and think-tank perspectives.  He writes “(Trump is like) King Canute trying to fight, instead of the ocean tides, the tides of technology.”

I’ll conclude with another, somewhat longer historical reference which illuminates Trump’s campaign of China-bashing as a central element of his re-election strategy.  It is drawn (almost) verbatim from Episode 66 of The History of Rome podcast series by Mike Duncan:

“Conscious that his standing with the people was taking a hit, the Emperor decided he needed to find someone to take the fall for the fire.  Someone he could point to and say it was them, not me, I didn’t have anything to do with it.  But he couldn’t just grab someone off the street because, with his popularity sinking like a stone, that would just engender the further charge that he was setting up some innocent to take all the blame.  What Nero needed was someone, some group that the people disliked even more than him, someone that the people were ready, willing and able to believe had done this horrible thing if for no other reason than that the people were looking for an excuse to round up and punish them. Enter the Christians. In the thirty odd years since the death of Christ, nascent Christian communities had begun cropping up throughout the Empire.  At first, they were primarily Jewish in character but through the missionary work of St Paul, known later as the Apostle to the Gentiles, this new religion began to spread into the Greco-Roman world.  By the Emperor’s reign, a tiny community of believers, led according to tradition by St. Peter, had established a religious beachhead in Rome itself. The problem the early Christians faced in Rome, though, was not just that their religion, in comparison to the wider pagan world, struck the average Roman as downright weird, but also that at this point most Christian adherents were non-citizen resident aliens in the city who spoke primarily Greek or Hebrew. So the Christians in Rome looked different, spoke a different language, usually came from the lower rungs of the social ladder, and belonged to a strange monotheistic cult that seemed to have cannibalistic overtones. All in all, they were capital O Other in every sense of the word. And as has been proven over and over again by history, whenever terrible things happen to a community – economic problems, floods, plagues, fires – it is the capital O Others who usually get blamed. So desperate to shift responsibility for the great fire away from himself, the Emperor looked at these Others and decided to lay it all on them.”

The only change I have made to this podcast text, recorded in August 2009, was my substitution of the central character’s title instead of his name.  Even with that switch, there’s little surprise who that Emperor was.

Nero.

 

 

Everything that I have ever done professionally has been approached and viewed through the lens of one of two disciplines.  Eventually, I learned to combine the two.

The first was the discipline of cultural anthropology. A twelfth-grade class in 20th c. religious thought led me to major in Asian Comparative Religion at Princeton which led me (after a year of traveling overland from Europe to Taiwan via Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal) to a joint MA/PhD program at the University of California at Berkeley.  Two and a half years living at 10,500’ in the village of Tengyi in the Manang Valley north of Annapurna (pictured below), taught me how to see the world through the eyes of people with different circumstances and values.

 

The other was the discipline of diplomacy.  I joined the U.S. Foreign Service in the spring of 1988, a little more than two years after getting my degree.  (I should mention at this point that I made very good use of the intervening time by moving to New York to court Grace, by marrying Grace, and by renovating our first house in Brooklyn.) Having cleared the various assessment hurdles of the Foreign Service test and having been given an offer to join, it wasn’t a hard decision.  My clearest career idea upon receiving my doctorate was that I did not want to stay in academics.  And my only interview in the corporate world – with SmithKline (now Glaxo) – could have made for an amusing episode of The Office.  So I took the offer. Having come in initially through the State Department, I asked for a lateral transfer into the U.S. Department of Commerce branch of the Foreign Service, because my sense was that — for the two places I really wanted to be posted, China and Japan – a lot of the Embassy action was on the business side.  I wasn’t wrong. Anyway, the point I want to make here is that the anthropological viewpoint worked well with the diplomatic viewpoint to help me see issues in three dimensions and, with that better field of vision, helped me resolve some the issues at the heart of the U.S.-Japan Auto Talks and other knotty diplomatic challenges.  I don’t think I ever told business clients, and rarely told Embassy colleagues, that I was trained as a cultural anthropologist.  I definitely never contemplated for a moment putting PhD on my business cards. But I used the anthropological perspective every day during my time in the Foreign Service.

 

With this as personal introduction, I’ll share here the three roadmaps – ‘pathmaps,’ more accurately – which have been most helpful in guiding me through both the magnificent panoramas and the minefields of modern U.S.-China relations.  In coming weeks, I will give each of these works its own dedicated post.  Today will simply list the three with brief thumbnail intros and identify the common thread I have found most useful.

 

1

Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century

By Orville Schell and John Delury

Random House (2013)

Given to me for Christmas in 2013 by James Gibney — former Foreign Service colleague in Tokyo, editor extraordinaire, and godfather to my younger son – Wealth and Power brings to life a simple but profound insight.  Through the life stories of eleven completely different individuals — in some cases, mortal enemies – Schell and Delury show how all eleven hew to a single goal, China’s rejuvenation through the acquisition of wealth and power.  The early 19th c. scholar Wei Yuan and the activist Feng Guifen proposed completely different courses of action; the Empress Dowager Cixi, the “new citizen” Liang Qichao and the reformer Sun Yaat-sen all saw radically different pathways to modernization, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong led opposing sides of a decades-long civil war, and Zhu Rongji (whom I met as Mayor of Shanghia on several occasions during my first posting there) and Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiabo had entirely different conceptions of the moral duty of a citizen in modern China.  Nonetheless, despite differing in their ideas of the best means to reach the goal, they all shared an absolutely identical understanding of the most urgent goal in their lives – helping China acquire enough wealth and power to regain its traditional standing as a world colossus.  (This goal, incidentally, continues to be inculcated in the education of every school child in China today).

 

2

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order

By Bruno Maçães

Hurst Publishers (2019)

 

This book is included not because it is one of the best books about China.  Far from it.  John Pomfret’s The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom and countless other books would make that cut in front of Maçães.  The reason for Belt and Road’s inclusion here is that Maçães does something few too scholars and commentators on China bother to do.  He puts himself into the minds and mindset  of the Chinese government planners who are charting China’s future.  This is what an anthropologist does and the insight it provides helps minimize misunderstanding and creates more space for successful diplomatic outcomes.

Maçães is himself a former Portuguese diplomat with extensive experience in Hong Kong and China.  To give just a sense of his approach, Maçães argues that Western theories of international relations entirely miss the basic conception at the heart of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).  In Maçães’ view, that conception “follows Taoist logic: the single concept first divides in two — land and sea — then in several — the corridors and coutnries — then in many — the specific projects and privileged locations” in the BRI enterprise.

 

3

The U.S. and China in the 21st Century: Sub-National Sino-American Relations

Course Number IMPA 608 in the School of Liberal & Professional Studies (FY 2019 & 20)

International Masters of Public Administration, Fox Leadership International

Instructor: Terry Cooke   Co-Instructor: Liyiran (Shelly) Xia

 

This is the course I taught at Penn for two years before COVID-19 hit and the course was furloughed.  I hasten to point out that I am adding it here because of the input from students, rather than because of my syllabus.  The course is designed in two parts: the first seven weeks involves readings, lectures and classroom discussion structured on the basis of my syllabus; the second seven weeks, the most valuable part of the course, is a knowledge co-creation exercise based on original research, much of it in Chinese, which the students conduct and present.  It is through this knowledge co-creation exercise and through insights provided by the students and Co-Instructor Shelly Xia that I have been able to articulate the framework which informs the Ambitions portion of the TEA Collaborative project (T = Technology, E = Energy/Environment, A = Ambitions).  The Ambitions portion seeks to understand and systematically present the MacroDevelopment vision which Chinese government planners have been elaborating and adjusting since the birth of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 (and have been communicating clearly in their Five Year Plans).  It is an effort to apply the joint lens of anthropology and diplomacy to better understand the motivation and to better delineate the opportunities and challenges associated with China’s MacroDev trajectory.  We use three time periods (and, in the last time, period two different geographies) to organize this undertaking:

1949 – 1978:               Version 1.0 of the PRC MacroDev Model

1982 – 2009:               Version 2.0 of the PRC MacroDev Model

2012 – Current:           Version 3.0 of the PRC MacroDev Model
A) Domestic Release
B) International Release (Belt & Road Initiative

Note: the years not covered above were years of opaque, internal deliberation
within the Chinese Communist Party leadership

 

The Common Thread

 

 

I hope the point is obvious.  The common thread here is being able to understand the world as seen through the eyes of your counterpart.  As in business, you don’t always know whether your counterpart will prove to be protagonist or antagonist, friend or foe.  In order to negotiate the best possible deal, however, it is always vital to understand as well as possible that counterpart’s motivations, core values and thought processes.  Whether the climate of U.S.-China relations is chilly or warm, I choose to stand firmly on that ground.

 

The global scientific consensus, most prominently supported by the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), assesses with high confidence a global warming increase of 1 °C as measured against preindustrial levels. Currently experienced effects from the 1 °C global warming which has already occurred include: loss of sea ice and glacial shrinking, accelerated sea level rises, shifting atmospheric and oceanic currents, longer and more intense heat waves and hurricane seasons. Impacts on the biosphere include the shifting of plant and animal ranges, earlier plant and tree flowering, and rapid declines in bio- diversity. All of these changes threaten the equilibrium of the planet and, more fundamentally, the continued viability of human adaptation to the planet.

The most recent comprehensive report issued by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018 compares the difference in impacts on human societies (the ‘delta’) if global warming is allowed to reach 2 °C as opposed to being stabilized at 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels. These delta effects2 include: an additional 10 million people endangered by sea level rise; several hundred million more people made susceptible to poverty; 50% more people exposed to water stress; loss of 1.5 million additional tons of global annual catch for marine fisheries; the number of plant and animal species on which human life depends losing half their habitat.

Clearly, the challenge is epochal. Even assuming that all countries in the world fulfill their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) pledged in the Paris Agreement, the world is currently on track to exceed 1.5° C by 2050 and to remain well above that threshold into the next century.

At a national level, the challenge is no less urgent or less central to societal well-being. Even for an administration notably skeptical of climate change science and aggressively committed to deregulating and redefining environmental standards so as to lessen the severity of threat assessments, the outlook remains dire. According to the Trump Administration’s most recent Climate Assessment3, which synthesizes the data and projections from thirteen federal agencies, key risks facing the nation as a direct result of climate change include risks to communities, the economy, water quality, citizen health, ecosystems, agricultural and food supply; the nation’s infrastructure; and the nation’s defense. To quote directly several specific examples:

  • “Climate change creates new risks and exacerbates existing vulnerabilities in communities across the United States, presenting growing challenges to human health and safety, quality of life, and the rate of economic growth;”
  • “Without substantial and sustained global mitigation and regional adaptation efforts, climate change is expected to cause growing losses to American infrastructure and property and impede the rate of economic growth over this century;”
  • “The quality and quantity of water available for use by people and ecosystems across the country are being affected by climate change, increasing risks and costs to agriculture, energy production, industry, recreation and the environment;”
  • “Impacts from climate change on extreme weather and climate-related events, air quality, and the transmission of disease through insects and pests, food and water increasingly threaten the health and well-being of the American people, particularly populations that are already vulnerable;”
  • “Ecosystems and the benefits they provide to society are being altered by climate change and these impacts are projected to continue. Without substantial and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, transformative impacts on some ecosystems will occur; some coral reef and sea ice ecosystems are already experiencing such transformational changes;”
  • “Rising temperatures, extreme heat, drought, wildfire on rangelands, and heavy downpours are expected to increasingly disrupt agricultural productivity in the United States. Expected increases in challenges to livestock health, declines in crop yields and quality, and changes in extreme events in the United States and abroad threaten rural livelihoods, sustainable food security, and price stability;”
  • “Our Nation’s aging and deteriorating infrastructure is further stressed by increases in heavy precipitation events, coastal flooding, heat, wildfire, and other extreme events, as well as changes to average precipitation and temperature. Without adaptation, climate change will continue to degrade infrastructure performance over the rest of the century, with the potential for cascading impacts that threaten our economy, national security, essential services and health and well-being.”These effects are felt most directly at the local level. This is because the costs which climate change inflicts globally and nationally – costs of community disruption, slowing economic growth, deteriorating water quality, ecosystem disequilibrium, and infrastructural decay – are mostly borne at the local level. To address this challenge, the City of Philadelphia, like most major cities in the country and many counties and townships as well, has its own Climate Action Plan. Generally, these local plans have three major components: (1) at the grassroots level, the plan serves to connect with various stakeholder groups such as businesses, educational institutions, residential associations, and engaged constituencies to raise awareness and help coordinate common effort; (2) at the local governmental level, the plan articulates the limited number of focal areas where local government has determined its scarce dollars canhave greatest, proactive impact; and (3) at the supra-local governmental level, these plans serve as the blueprints for collaboration with other cities and regions, as the justification for federal budget requests, and as the channel for consolidating and reporting local ‘carbon emissions savings’ into the Paris Agreement NDC process.

As we have learned with the COVID-19 pandemic, a straightforward scientific fact can be politically complicated.  Acknowledging and addressing human-caused climate change is politically complex in the U.S. at this moment.  So is cooperating with China on anything.  Recognizing those complexities does not, however, absolve us of the responsibility to find a way forward on both the science and the international relations.

1.5° is where the U.S. and China must meet.

Volume 2, Number 2 in Global TECHtonics: U.S./China Fault-line series

 

One of the most memorable moments from the two months of A-100 training I received upon entry into the U.S. Foreign Service was a leadership training film about the 1985 Bradford City Football (Soccer) Stadium fire.  A small fire, sparked in a code-violation trash pile, was quickly whipped by winds into a fire engulfing substantial portions of the stadium. The raging fire trapped spectators, killing 56 and injuring at least 265.

Filmed on-site during the panic, the key point in this very graphic film involved the challenge of communications in a crisis.  As described by Wikipedia, “In the mass panic …, fleeing crowds escaped on to the pitch but others at the back of the stand tried to break down locked exit doors to escape, and many were burnt to death at the turnstiles gates, which had also been locked after the match had begun.” The specific problem was that people at the front of the mass of people trying to flee from the gates quickly recognized that those gates were locked but, in the panic, could not communicate the problem back to the people pressing forward from behind.  Had clear communication been possible, everyone could have found an alternative exit. As it was, scores of people ended up pinned against the gates and perished.

The lesson for the U.S.-China technology upheaval currently underway is straightforward: the implications of the upheaval appear different to different parties, depending upon their position in the field of action, and there is danger of differing reactions and poor communications compounding the danger and likewise leading to tragedy.

The goal of this post is to set out in very general terms the different industry groups affected by the Trump Administration’s efforts to date to “decouple” the U.S. and Chinese tech spheres – denying various sub-sectors of the Chinese tech industry access to the U.S. market, incentivizing U.S. firms to bring their production from China back to the U.S., and also encouraging allied governments to reinforce both approaches.  There are four major technology sub-sectors that, to date, have been affected by these policy moves.  In addition to providing simple, thumbnail descriptions of each of these four sub-sectors and how they have been affected by the Trump Administration policy approach, we will also rank them in terms of national security risk and look at the potential for a seismic reaction being triggered.

A simple way of assessing national security risk and gauging the related potential for a Bradford Stadium-type chain of events is to think in terms of crisis management.  Crisis management experts generally identify four distinct stages as a true crisis develops. The following is drawn from the Crisis Prevention Institute’s Crisis Development Model:

  1. Anxiety

Anxiety prompts changes in behavior and looking at things differently. It’s a time to listen and observe, not dictate what should happen next.

  1. Defensive Behavior

Defensive behavior can be a natural escalation of anxiety; it’s the point where actors in crisis begins to lose rationality.

  1. Risk Behavior

Risk behavior is displayed as actors enter crisis and reach the point of propensity to harm themselves or others.

  1. Tension Crisis

Every crisis reaches a point of meltdown or tension reduction. Crisis behaviors, as they escalate, expend a tremendous amount of energy.

So here we go …

 

 

Level One

Among the earliest Trump Administration actions targeting technology products from China involved the use of tariffs.  While the various rounds of tariff actions are too technical and convoluted to get into here, a few broad generalizations can be made.  First, the tariff actions put into effect were more targeted to electronic components than to finished electronic consumer products.  For instance, componentry for modems, routers and televisions were subject to two rounds of steep tariff increases and microelectronic chips were assessed a hefty 25% tariff while consumer products such as cellphones, laptops and video games, despite a series of threats by Trump to impose tariffs in the summer and fall of 2019, have still not been hit with any tariffs to date. The President’s advisors apparently convinced him, as the Christmas season approached, that voters would not take kindly to sudden price increases for these products. Second, there is little evidence to suggest that these tariffs inflicted enough pain on Chinese technology manufacturers and exporters to induce them to substantially change their behavior or to protest loudly to their government for relief.  Tariff increases can be absorbed at any link in the supply chain stretching from the manufacturer and its supplier network (in China) to the importer, distributor and retail outlet (in the U.S.) or, alternatively, can end up simply be passed on to the consumer (in the U.S.).  Preliminary analysis indicates that the U.S. side of the supply chain in technology products has likely absorbed as much pain from these rounds of tariff actions as the Chinese side has been forced to absorb.  Third, tariffs are the quintessential sledgehammer used to crack open a peanut.  Even if they actually hit the peanut, it tends not to yield anything worth the effort and can cause considerable damage to the surroundings.

At the same time that the Trump Admistration was rolling out waves of tariffs to target imported goods from China, they were also tightening and expanding limits on investment into the U.S. by Chinese technology companies – as well as certain other types of companies – on the grounds that they represent a risk to U.S. national security.  The mechanism for achieving this was through expansion of the review powers of the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an inter-agency body comprising nine cabinet-level departments and chaired by the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.

As with the tariff actions, the heightened scrutiny of potential Chinese investments into the U.S. by CFIUS served primarily to send a political signal to the Chinese side that the commercial and economic climate was getting chillier for Chinese companies in the U.S.  Chinese companies looked for work-arounds, adjusted their business plans, and in some cases looked to other world markets to take up the slack.  These two sets of actions caused some tremors but did not cause the ground to fundamentally shift under U.S.-China relations.  This represented, broadly speaking, the Anxiety Phase of the building crisis.

 

Level Two

The first indication of a second, potentially more consequential level of tension occurred in the spring of 2018, as President Trump was repeatedly threatening to levy tariffs on China  but before the imposition of the first round of tariffs in July of that year.   That second front involved Shenzhen-headquartered ZTE, one of China’s largest makers of smartphones and telecommunications equipment. In March, two ZTE affiliates agreed to a civil and criminal penalty of $1.19 billion for having illegally shipped telecommunications equipment to Iran and North Korea.  Two months later, after it was found out that ZTE had failed to reprimand and had, in fact, paid bonuses to the executives involved in those illegal shipments, a seven-year ban on the export of U.S. components to supply ZTE’s manufacturing facilities in China was instituted.  This ban was widely viewed as a likely ‘death sentence.’ The manufacture of ZTE smartphones would not be possible without access to U.S.-made microelectronic hardware and Android operating system software.  Moreover, the fact that ZTE had been designated as a risk to U.S. national security hung like a sword of Damocles over the country’s future.  But, almost immediately, the sentence was lifted without clear explanation.  On May 13th, President Trump tweeted “President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done.”  One week later, the U.S. Commerce Department eased the restrictions and on June 7th a deal was reached whereby the Chinese company agreed to complete a $400 million escrow payment in return for the complete lifting of the seven-year export ban.

The whole sequence of events was somewhat baffling except for what it indicated about President Trump’s penchant for injecting himself personally into company-specific matters and for taking public and dramatic steps to build his rapport with President Xi.  There is widespread speculation that Trump hoped, through this off-again on-again  courtship of Xi, that he would get a trade deal which would allow for the lifting of the whole raft of “Level One” tariffs and give him a major trade deal to tout in the run-up to the 2020 elections.

It was not to be.  U.S. and Chinese trade negotiators continued to slog through their negotiations inconclusively and an apparently frustrated Trump and the U.S. national security apparatus soon turned their attention to an even larger target than ZTE–Huawei, China’s national champion in that industry space.  Founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a former army officer, and also headquartered in Shenzhen, Huawei employs 200,000 and manufactures telecommunications equipment, particularly equipment used in the infrastructural backbone of the new 5G standard for telecom, and consumer electronics, particularly smartphones.  As was the case with ZTE, the Trump Administration voiced a specific legal concern and general national security concern in launching its campaign against Huawei.  The legal matter concerned charges that Huawei too had created elaborate corporate structures to evade the U.S.-led “maximum pressure” sanctions regime against Iran.  Specifically and most visibly, that legal issue crystallized around the detention in Canada of Ren’s daughter and Huawei CFO, Meng Wanzhou in early December 2018.  The charges, unveiled publicly by the U.S. Justice Department in late January 2019, alleged a decade-long attempt by Huawei and Meng to steal trade secrets, to obstruct a criminal investigation and to evade economic sanctions on Iran.  Canada was asked to extradite Meng to the U.S. to face trial on these charges.

The broader national security issue behind the campaign against Huawei centered on the charge that the Chinese government would be able to get access to the torrent of data coursing through next generation 5G telecom networks.  To the extent that Huawei-supplied network components are built into the backbone of those networks, Huawei could gain access to the data. And, the thinking goes, that since Huawei is a China-based, PRC-supported champion company, Huawei would have no ability – protestations by the founder and company spokespeople to the contrary – to resist Chinese government requests for access to that data.

The two characteristics of the still on-going U.S. government-led campaign against Huawei which sharply distinguish it from the earlier actions against ZTE are its long duration and its expansion to the international field.  Each one of these two characteristics presents complexity which defies easy summarization.  Future posts will examine the international dimension of this campaign which has brought the Trump Administration some hard-won headway but also a sometimes stunning level of push-back and public repudiation from traditional allies.

For now, the point is simply that the initial evanescent campaign against ZTE and now the sustained campaign against Huawei can together be thought to represent the second level of effort, and risk, in forcing U.S.-China tech decoupling.  Representing a natural escalation of the anxiety provoked by the various tariff rounds, these two sets of actions – and, particularly, the Huawei campaign — reveal factors of irrationality coming into play.  On the Chinese side, the issue is a personal affront to Xi Jinping.  It is also catnip for the millions of Chinese “netizens” who use nationalistic vitriol and memes to inflame public opinion which, in turn, further narrows the options available to Xi and his government policy makers.  On the U.S. side, Trump Administration officials have tried to cajole other countries into raising their own costs and slowing their own transition to 5G by foregoing Huawei equipment without providing specific evidence of the claimed threats to help countries justify taking these steps.  Domestically, the Administration has failed to provide a clear rationale and consistent messaging so that the public can assess the risks.  Instead, the Administration has framed the issue in terms that are highly personalized to Trump and in a tone that is more macho than rational.  It has become, in effect, a bullet point in Trump’s “I’m tougher on China than Sleepy Joe will ever be” reelection strategy.

The factor which has perhaps kept these actions from destabilizing U.S.-China relations even more is that the U.S. doesn’t have its own horse in the 5G sweepstakes.  The two major competitors to Huawei are Ericsson (Sweden) and Nokia (Finland).  The fact that European allies have been so reluctant to sign on to the U.S. campaign against Huawei, even though two major EU companies stand to gain competitively, underlines just how weak the national security case which Trump officials put forward has been.  Over recent months, as the campaign has made some headway following an initial and embarrassing series of stalls out of the gate, Samsung  (Sourth Korea) has also emerged as a potential provider of 5G telecom infrastructure components.

 

Level Three

 

A third, but more nascent, level of conflict is now beginning to take shape around social media networks and search engine companies.  The players at center-stage of this now emerging drama are the tech giants:  Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft in the U.S. and Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (the so-called ‘BAT’ trio) and Bytedance in China.  For U.S. readers not familiar with the commercial landscape in China, Baidu, the weakest of the trio, makes money, somewhat like Netflix, principally through advertising and content subscription services built around its Baidu search engine.  Alibaba, the strongest of the trio, operates a vast Amazon-like selling site for both business (B2B) and consumer (B2C) end-users.  Leveraging extraordinary global reach and profitability with this base of operations in e-commerce sales and delivery, the Alibaba family of companies is increasingly branching into business areas as diverse as cloud computing, media and entertainment, microfinance and tourism.  Tencent is the owner of WeChat, a multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app which has achieved far greater penetration in the Chinese market – and has become more of an indispensable feature in the lives of its users — than any comparable app has achieved in the U.S.  Bytedance is the owner of the massively popular TikTok app.

The market access picture for U.S. firms in China has been markedly less open than that traditionally enjoyed by the above Chinese firms in the U.S.  Put simply, there has not been reciprocity and the U.S. Big Five Tech Giants have long faced restrictions limiting their ability to do business in China.  This is a direct reflection of the Chinese government’s sensitivity, verging on paranoia, about its citizenry’s ability to access sources of information beyond the government’s control.  (The three pillars of control for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have been, even before assuming control of the nation in 1949, the so-called Three P’s – the Party, the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) and Propaganda).  Of the five U.S. companies, Apple’s iPhone and Microsoft’s personal computers and LinkedIn business networking service have enjoyed relatively freer access to the Chinese market, though that access is nonetheless significantly constrained. Microsoft, which has had a presence in China since 1992, has fared the best.  Its operating system controls more than a third of the market in China and through its research center in China (its second largest in the world), Microsoft works closely with major Chinese companies on innovative product development. Apple has enjoyed some access for its iPhones, however, the iPhone’s penetration has been limited in China by its high price-point and positioning as an aspirational brand undercut in price by Huawei and Xiaomi.  The other three companies have been largely shut out of the market: Google by its refusal to accede to demands, explicit and implied, to make search results and other data available to the Chinese government; Facebook has flatly failed to get government permission to operate in the Chinese market despite years of personal lobbying by Mark Zukerberg (which included Zuckerberg learning Mandarin, recommending Xi Jinping’s book to his employees and even asking Xi Jinping to suggest a name in Chinese for his baby); and Amazon, which faced stiff price competition from Alibaba and JD.com, decided in early 2019 to shut down its uphill effort to build an e-commerce marketplace business in China.

While fierce competition is an undoubted factor in explaining some of this picture of limited presence by the U.S. tech giants in China, government policy is the paramount issue.  As previously mentioned, an overriding element of the government’s restrictive policy has to do with control over information.  An additional element has to do with the government’s drive – also seen in the aerospace and financial sectors – to give homegrown companies a protected space to grow domestically in order to develop into global competitors and foreign exchange earners.  That this is inconsistent with commitments which China made upon entry into the WTO in December 2001 is a cause of concern for the global community.  That it creates an unequal playing field for U.S. firms in China is a common concern shared by both political parties in the U.S. and needs to be addressed.  That there is evidence of Chinese firms using their penetration of the U.S. market to conduct unauthorized data collection from U.S. citizens is even a greater matter of concern, one that demands strong and strategic counter-measures.

On this last point, it is an established and publicized fact that WeChat has been used to collect data from the devices of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without the individual’s or the U.S. Government knowledge and, of course , without any legal authorization.  Any and all information on a compromised device is at risk in these instances. The pattern of known instances of compromise suggests strongly that there has been a directed campaign by the PRC at work rather than a series of random or accidental intrusions by Tencent. Substantially more information on this vulnerability is known within U.S. government circles than has been shared to date through public sources.

It is this type of vulnerability which is the behind the Trump Administration’s announcement on August 6th of this year of signed Presidential orders to ban commercial transactions with WeChat’s parent company, Tencent, and with Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent.  The fact that 60% of users of the TikTok platform are under the age of 24 make it seem, at first blush, to be an unlikely target for PRC government-directed surveillance. But closer inspection shows that risks are not negligible.  There is the established precedent from WeChat.  There is the vast user base – 85 million in the U.S and 1 billion worldwide.  Also, as any expert will tell you, surveillance and espionage seek to exploit any vulnerability and one’s children can be a significant vulnerability.  Finally, younger people are disproportionately represented in the workforce of some of the most innovative and cutting-edge industries.

I will have occasion in the future to post on several aspects of this emerging arena of U.S.-China conflict.  One topic involves the “geo-commercial” advantage which China enjoys with its population size, its unmatched number of smart-phone users, and its lax privacy laws, standards, and public expectations.  As a result of these factors, Chinese companies are able to develop algorithms for new products and services more effectively and efficiently than their competitors.  Bytedance’s TikTok is itself an example of this phenomenon.  A second topic will be ‘balkanization’ of the Internet which will accelerate as the U.S. and China continue to de-couple and de-globalize their tech interests.  A third topic will be the decisive role which India is likely to play in this contest as it balances its position as a massive market for cut-rate, Chinese-made smart-phones and as an important English-language strategic partner for Facebook and other U.S. social media and internet content and service providers.

For now, we can wrap this section with the observation that this emerging front in U.S.-China tech de-coupling involves a unique level of risk.  It is so entwined in the lives of so many users and it touches on the core interest of so many behemoth companies in both the U.S. and China that it is markedly different from the risks found on the ZTE and Huawei front.  While we are likely just in the early days of this new sphere of competition, it brings the U.S.-China relationship  clearly into the third, risk behavior phase of the crisis development cycle. As this front continues to become a focal point, the public attitude and corporate bottom-line interests at stake are so core that entry into a mutually-destructive cycle of action and counter-action is almost foreordained unless both sides exercise great discernment and discipline.

 

 

Level Four

In last week’s post, Timing Matters, we touched on the issue of supply chains for semiconductors and advanced electronics.  Because these products are the ‘brains’ behind entire emerging industries – artificial intelligence and robotics, autonomous vehicles, the commercialization of space, and others – this is where the United States’ and China’s economic competition is most fierce.  Because these supply chains inextricably pass through Taiwan and Taiwan-headquartered industry leaders like TSMC – the economic risk is compounded by political risk.

The Assessing China ”Global TECHtonics: U.S./China Fault-line” series will delve much more deeply into this issue in the months ahead.  Suffice it to say for now, that microelectronics and the global supply chains which help produce and distribute semiconductors and related products globally will be the fault-line which either ends up triggering a cataclysmic upheaval between the U.S. and China or, through inter-governmental negotiation, helps to settle the entire relationship on a new, more stable and sustainable basis.

 

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