Tag Archives: foreign policy

Do your own Work

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As the US begins, however tentatively, to start severing scientific ties with the People’s Republic of China, some American scientists are manufacturing an alarm and sounding off about it.

China has built itself into a powerful engine of scientific discovery in recent decades, partly with American help, and many in Washington fear that China could gain a security and military advantage unless the US takes decisive steps to cut off cooperation in scientific research.
Many scientists warn, however, that Washington would be severing ties as China is making its greatest contributions to scientific advancements, and cutting it off risks slowing American progress in critical areas such as biotechnology, clean energy, and telecommunications.

Never mind that those scientific achievements have been done with an American help that includes a very large fraction via intellectual property theft, IP gained through economic extortion (give it over, or you can’t do business in the PRC), and outright espionage.

Never mind, either, that other nation’s scientists—those of Canada, Israel, Germany, Great Britain, France, Ukraine(!), and on and on—are every bit as good as the PRC’s, if not better, from the greater freedom of those nations’ economic, political, and research environments. A disruption while the collaborations transition would only be transient.

There’s this aspect of the US-PRC science relationship, too:

The US depends more heavily on China than China does on the US in some strategic areas, according to an analysis by Clarivate [a specialist in science analytics] of studies in respected journals shared exclusively with The Wall Street Journal. Between 2017 and 2021, US-China collaborations accounted for 27% of US-based scientists’ high-quality research in nanoscience, for example, but only 13% of China-based scientists’. The gap in telecommunications was even wider, with collaborations accounting for 10% of China’s output but more than 33% of the US’s.

The science complainers do not see this threat? I’m not sanguine about degree of their…naivete. Regardless, it’s time to end that dependence.

Some of the plaints are just petty, though.

[Tian] Xia, the professor of medicine at UCLA, said he has stopped his research on birth defects because he doesn’t know how to work with embryonic stem cells. That was the expertise of his Chinese collaborators.

A grown man sulking like a toddler. It’s a pity. It’s not that difficult to find experts in embryonic stem cells; that general technology has been around for decades, and there are experts with birth defect-related skills outside of the PRC. Xia just seems upset because he doesn’t get to work with his buds in the PRC as easily as he wants.

Our scientists need to do their own work or collaborate with other scientists in the US and in our friends’ and allies’ nations, and stop sharing our secrets with our enemies.

It’s almost as if these complaining scientists consider their personal careers and researches more important than the security of the nation that encourages and fosters their researches and whose economic, political, and research environment facilitates the flourishing of their research programs, and of their careers.

Go Ahead On

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IBM was interested in buying the Israeli chip maker, Tower Semiconductor, and the acquisition might have raised antitrust concerns in Israel, the US, the EU, and elsewhere around the world. Each of those antitrust concerns, if acted on, would have had effect only inside the nation raising the concern, however, making the matter purely a business decision whether to go through with the merger and simply not do business in the objection nation. Nobody objected, though, except the People’s Republic of China.

The PRC’s State Administration for Market Regulation balked and withheld approval, so IBM meekly quit the deal altogether, apparently in order to appease the PRC and preserve—IBM hoped—its other business concerns there.

Slow walking or outright blocking tech and other mergers with, or acquisitions by, American companies is part of the PRC’s economic aggression against us as that nation objects to our objecting to the PRC’s economic aggressions and to its tech and intellectual property extortion and theft. IBM is working, it seems, at cross-purposes with our struggle against the PRC.

Other moves by the PRC have included blocking

  • Qualcomm‘s acquisition of Netherland’s chip maker NXP Semiconductors
  • DuPont‘s acquisition of electronics-materials specialist Rogers Corp, an Arizona-headquartered company
  • certain PRC domiciled companies from buying memory chips from US chip giant Micron

It would have been better for IBM—and those other companies, too; IBM‘s managers don’t have a lock on timidity—to proceed with the acquisition and to eliminate the PRC’s antitrust concerns by not doing business associated with the acquisition’s chips inside the PRC or with businesses domiciled inside the PRC. Or for IBM, et al., to stop doing business with the PRC altogether.

It would have been a beneficial twofer had IBM gone ahead on with the acquisition: IBM and Tower merge, Israel, the US, the EU, and most of the rest of the world would reap the benefits of the merging, and IBM and Tower would be out from under the PRC’s regulatory thumb.

It would be beneficial for our nation, too, if the managers of our businesses had the courage to stand up to our enemies and walk away from them.

Chip Manufacturing

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The Biden administration is bent on bringing computer chip manufacturing back into the United States. On its face, that would seem beneficial. However, the administration team he’s formed to oversee the matter and its $39 billion of taxpayer dollars allocated to the program is populated with

investment bankers, private-equity investors, and management consultants.

And apparently no chip engineers or anyone familiar with supplying chip factories.

Uh, huh.

The Manhattan Project and the crash program to develop treatments for the Wuhan Virus were populated, strongly preferentially, with experts in the field, and they just as strongly deemphasized the moneybags experts.

That’s not the case with Biden’s nightmare dream team of money allocators. This isn’t a true crash program, certainly, but it’s still an effort to rapidly guts something up. It needs experts in the field to do the gutsing, it does not need politically connected money handlers.

Biden’s Tightrope

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That’s what the editors over on The Wall Street Journal calls President Joe Biden’s (D) move to bar US investments in certain People’s Republic of China technologies and enterprises.

President Biden’s executive order on Wednesday restricting US investment in Chinese military technologies tries to balance national security and business interests. The problem is that Beijing doesn’t distinguish between the two, which is why business risk in China is rising.

This is the fallacy of the editors and of Biden: since the PRC does not distinguish between national security interests and business interests—does not separate out military utility from civilian utility—when it comes to technology there is no balance for our government to seek. All tech, in the PRC’s eyes, has military utility, therefore all tech American businesses and those of our friends and allies might sell or otherwise transfer into the PRC has military utility, and all such American sales and transfers should be barred, and those of our friends and allies should be jawboned against. The transfers threaten our national security as well as that of our friends and allies.

The White House concern is that the Communist Party will weaponize US venture and private-equity investment in technologies such as artificial intelligence.

In a heartbeat the CPC will. Biden’s bar reflects some understanding of PRC President Xi Jinping’s avowed goal, which he facilitates by eliminating

barriers between civilian and commercial sectors and military and defense industrial sectors, not just through research and development, but also by acquiring and diverting the world’s cutting-edge technologies, for the purposes of achieving military dominance.

But then Biden shied away from taking the full step.

open global capital flows create valuable economic opportunities and promote competitiveness, innovation, and productivity.

And:

Auto makers will still be able to invest in Chinese self-driving systems. Drug makers can join with Chinese companies to develop new drugs.

Never mind that self-driving technology has obvious uses in the PLA’s mechanized/armored ground forces, the PLA’s air forces, the PLA’s naval forces. Never mind, either that the tech used in developing new drugs supports the PLA’s ability to develop drugs for treating PLA diseases and casualties and to develop drugs and other biologics for offensive use.

The editors join him in that failure to follow through:

A complete de-coupling of the US and Chinese economies probably isn’t possible, or desirable, given their interdependence.

Yes, it is, and it’s more than desirable, it’s critical to our national economic and military security, and so to our political security. There will be some economic disturbances as our businesses relocate their supply chains—from ore and minerals in the ground up through final assembly components and end products—out of the PRC, and there will be some economic disturbances as our businesses buy and sell technologies with other customers than the PRC. Those temporary disturbances, though, need to be balanced against the long-term costs of being dominated by the PRC.

There’s no tightrope here, except in Biden’s timidity.

A Thought on Russia-PRC Relations

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The subheadline on a Wall Street Journal article that was centered on falling exports from the People’s Republic of China says it all regarding the growing relationship of the PRC with Russia.

Slide in outbound shipments reflects fraying trade ties with the Western world, even as exports to Russia boom

But at what cost to Russia are those exports? Russia hasn’t much with which to pay for them. The nation is short of hard currency, and its own goods are famous for their shoddiness. Russia, though, does have things of particular importance to the PRC: vast Siberian resources of oil, natural gas, coal, timber, and a variety of rare earths and ores whose extracted metals are critical for making batteries. To that end, Russia and the PRC concluded, a few short years ago, a trade treaty that has the PRC developing those fields and mines, extracting that output for PRC use alongside Russian use and in some cases for primary PRC use, and with PRC workers and their families moving into Siberia to do the work of development and extraction.

That last reveals one more item that Russia has to exchange for the PRC’s exports to it, an item of critical importance to the PRC: all that Siberian land.

And this, which subtext emphasizes the PRC’s dependency on Russia’s imports:

For China, weakening exports signal more trouble for its domestic economy….
…
July’s 14.5% drop in Chinese outbound goods shipments was sharper than the 12.4% year-over-year decline in June and outpaced the 12% decline expected by economists polled by The Wall Street Journal.
Chinese goods shipments to the US fell 23% in July compared with a year earlier. Shipments to the European Union and to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a group of 10 countries that includes Singapore and Indonesia, each dropped by about 21%.
Chinese shipments to Russia, a country under Western sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine, rose 52% in July from a year earlier, helped by sales of high-value goods including automobiles. For the first seven months of this year, Chinese exports to Russia soared 73% from a year earlier, even as China’s total exports have fallen 5%, data from Chinese customs show.

Thus, the dependency goes both ways, even as the PRC increasingly dominates the codependent relationship. As the West pulls back from buying goods and services from the PRC, the PRC becomes ever more dependent on Russian goods and services, especially those basic commodity goods of oil, natural gas, coal, timber, and Russian rare earths and battery-centric ores.

That growing PRC dependency makes the PRC’s land acquisitiveness even more dangerous for Russia.