Daily Archives: 23 February 2023

Lobbyists

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In particular, lobbyists representing the interests of the People’s Republic of China and companies domiciled there.

It turns out that the multinational retail and tech conglomerate Alibaba—headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, PRC—has lobbied, and donated lots of money to, American politicians, to the tune of $2.5 million just last year.

And this, via Voice of America:

Public information shows that Mercury, a lobbying firm, lobbied the White House repeatedly on behalf of Alibaba on technology policy issues, access to US capital markets, issues related to e-commerce, and small- and medium-sized enterprise export promotion.

That brings me to my beef about lobbyists and the White House. It’s one thing (however questionable or legitimate) for lobbyists to jawbone White House officials on behalf of companies, whether foreign or domestic. It should be unacceptable for lobbyists to jawbone White House officials on behalf of foreign governments—which in the case of the PRC, includes all businesses domiciled there, since all of those businesses are arms of the PRC’s intelligence community under that nation’s 2017 national intelligence law.

Foreign governments, in particular the PRC government, already have professional, talented, and perfectly suited lobbyists to White House officials: those governments’ Ambassadors and ambassadorial staff personnel. No one else should be lobbying.

Yet Another Reason

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…to stop trading with and to bar exports altogether to (and imports from) the People’s Republic of China.

A US manufacturer of X-ray equipment had a decade-old patent invalidated by a Chinese legal panel. A Spanish mobile-antenna designer lost a similar fight in a Shanghai court. Another Chinese court ruled that a Japanese conglomerate broke antitrust law by refusing to license its technology to a Chinese rival.

This is the PRC weaponizing its legal system as that nation prosecutes the economic axis of its cold war against the US and against the West in general.

This goes further, to include efforts to extend PRC legal jurisdiction into other nations:

In December, the EU sued China in the World Trade Organization on behalf of Swedish telecom-equipment maker Ericsson AB and other companies, complaining that China has barred EU companies from suing to protect their patents in courts outside China. The EU called China’s policy “extremely damaging,” saying Chinese companies requested the intervention “to pressure patent right holders to grant them cheaper access to European technology.”

This is just naked theft by a nation that insists on using its laws and courts as weapons of war rather than as tools for protecting its citizens.

It’s time for us and for the EU to stop technology transfers—under any guise—to the PRC, and that must include what I wrote in my lede: bar all exports to the PRC and stop trading with that enemy nation. The transition will be deucedly expensive, but it’ll only get more so the longer we dither and delay taking that step.