Daily Archives: 21 December 2017

Whose Information Is It?

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Information belongs to the government of the People’s Republic of China, apparently.  Especially when it’s investment information, information that might facilitate the prosperity of individual citizens and their businesses, information that might lessen their dependence on and control by, that government.

A Chinese quasi-regulator told the country’s top raters of investment funds to stop publicizing the sizes of money-market mutual funds, in what is being seen as another attempt by Beijing to slow the industry’s rapid pace of asset accumulation.

Because an informed investor can make his own decisions instead of the decisions Government wants him to make.

A copy of an internal directive reviewed by The Wall Street Journal told firms that rate and rank investment funds to avoid publishing the asset sizes for money-market funds, which could have the effect of drawing more investors to the largest funds.

Which would (in a free market) have the knock-on effect of competition raising rates paid investors in those not-largest funds, which would benefit the investors.  And the further knock-on effects of drawing yet more money into the funds and of adding liquidity to these short-term instruments which would facilitate the short-term borrowing (useful for inventory control, meeting payroll, etc) of businesses.  Which would have the further knock-on effect of spurring the private economy and not the Communist Party of China’s controlled economy.

Gotta keep the peasants down on the farm.  The cities are collecting too many of them, anyway.

Unless it’s proprietary or a matter of national secrets, information isn’t controlled by Government beyond a couple of laws protecting intellectual property and those secrets.  In free nations, anyway.

A Rival Power

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President Donald Trump, in his national strategy speech, labeled the People’s Republic of China as a rival power and as a revisionist power.  Which they are, regardless of how heinously politically incorrect the truth is.  After all, this is the nation that only pays public lip service to sanctions levied against northern Korea over the latter’s drive to develop deliverable nuclear weapons.  The PRC wants northern Korea as a stick in our eye and as a wedge with which to drive us apart from our Pacific allies and out of the western Pacific altogether.

This is the PRC that has seized the South China Sea, including waters and islands that belong to the Philippines, Vietnam, the Republic of China, Borneo, and nearly all the other nations rimming that Sea, and that is engaged in a military buildup there.  This is the PRC that has routinely threatened Japan and its islands in the East China Sea.  This is the PRC that economically threatened the Republic of Korea over its acceptance of American defensive missile systems against the threat from northern Korea.

This is the PRC that engages in hacking into our government’s computer systems and that engages in intellectual property theft—by fiat as a condition of doing business inside the PRC and via corporate espionage—in order to harm our national security at least as much as for its own economic gain.

And there’s this from bit of disingenuosity by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying:

China will never seek development at the price of sacrificing other countries’ interests[.]

Right.  See above.  Here’s Shen Dingli, Professor of International Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University:

The US isn’t wrong in perceiving Chinese competition for its place at the center stage of global affairs.

Yep.  And for all of the years of the prior administration, the US has shrunk away from that challenge.  See above for the inevitable result of that timidity.

With the PRC having long since restored Cold War policies against our interests and those of our friends and allies, it’s long since time we responded in a serious manner.  Now we need to follow through on our rhetoric.