Tag Archives: freedom

“Democracy Wanes in South Asia”

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Sadanand Dhume uses as his canonical examples Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, wherein riots forced the removal of despotic governments and their replacement by popularly chosen leaders. In Nepal in particular, new elections have been set for next March.

Dhume did point out popular failures in Pakistan and Myanmar; however, his apparent concept that popular uprisings are, of necessity, antidemocratic is badly flawed.

This is what our own Declaration of Independence has to say about such popular violence.

[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

A government deciding unilaterally and with little to no warning to censor—abolish!—major communications systems, a government that has had a single Prime Minister for 15 years during carefully controlled elections with opposition candidates routinely jailed, a government dominated for 17 years by a single pair of brothers whose government did little to protect its population from routine violence—each of these governments with their long train of abuses and usurpations… would seem to be prime candidates for the people to decide that their governments’ evils are sufferable and so to move to exercise their right…their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards.

What must Dhume think of the Color Revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, or the People Power revolution in the Philippines, each of which involved the successful popular overthrow of Despotic governments and their replacement with more democratic institutions?

We’ll see what happens in the subsequent elections, particularly in Nepal. Dhume may be correct vis-à-vis his examples, but it’s much too soon to tell.

Their Plan, Our Necessary Response

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The headline and subheadline of the editorial lay it out succinctly:

China’s No-Exit Plan for Foreigners
Beijing is blocking two more Americans from leaving the country which is part of a pattern.

Then the lede:

Chinese President Xi Jinping has been eager to lure American companies to invest in China, but you wouldn’t know it from Beijing’s latest actions. China is preventing American citizens, including a Commerce Department employee and a Wells Fargo banker, from leaving the country.

This is naked hostage-taking, and the only way to stop it is to counter it decisively, deeply, and broadly. That doesn’t mean if the PRC takes an American hostage, we take 10, nor does it mean if the PRC brings a knife to the matter, we bring a gun and all our friends with guns. It may come to that—tit-for-tat is far worse and more expensive than drastic and rapid escalation—but it’s not useful in the present context.

What is necessary is for Americans to stop traveling to the PRC under any circumstance—not to visit, not for tourism, not on business. This would be made more effective, and safer for business employees, if American businesses stopped doing business inside the PRC completely. Along those lines, our State Department should issue a Level 4 Travel Advisory—Do Not Travel—on travel to the PRC. The specific risks to travel are included with this level of advisory, and SecState should be explicit: there is an unacceptable risk of the American traveler being kidnapped by the PRC government and barred from leaving. It may be true, and it seems to be so for the two kidnap victims above, that the victims are free to roam about the PRC, but that just means they’re in a shabbily gilded cage.

In addition to those steps, our government needs to make those hostages our hostages against PRC good behavior: do nothing diplomatically or economically with the PRC until all of our citizens are back on US soil, safe and healthy. Rescind the PRC’s Most Favored Nation status and impose tariffs of at least 500% on all goods and services originating from the PRC, regardless of the path those things take in getting to the US, again until all of our citizens are back on US soil, safe and healthy.

Accelerate arming the Republic of China, the Republic of Korea, and Japan. Actively and overtly—with the presence of US Navy and Air Force assets—assist the Philippines in its defense of its island possessions in the South China Sea, including physically blocking PLAN ships from impeding Philippine shipping. Deem PLAN ship refusal to give way, maintaining a collision course as an attack on our ship or the Philippine ship, and fire on and sink the PLAN attacker. Work defense arrangements with Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia.

The more Xi and his minions object, the more rapidly we should push these moves.

Hostage takers deserve no profit; they do deserve to lose drastically.

California’s Disdain for our 2nd Amendment

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The 9th Circuit(!) has ruled that California’s demand for background checks (and associated delays in obtaining) as a precondition for citizens of that State buying ammunition is unconstitutional.

Naturally, California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor, Gavin Newsom, is up in arms over that ruling:

Strong gun laws save lives—and today’s decision is a slap in the face to the progress California has made in recent years to keep its communities safer from gun violence. Californians voted to require background checks on ammunition and their voices should matter.

It’s a well-deserved slap in the face, though; in response to Newsom’s administration’s and State legislature’s own slap in the face of American citizens. What Newsom and his fellow Party syndicate members carefully ignore is that we already have a strong gun law—the strongest—in the form of our 2nd Amendment. Writing for the 9th Circuit, Circuit Judge Sandra Ikuta tacitly reminded Newsom, et al., of this:

By subjecting Californians to background checks for all ammunition purchases, California’s ammunition background check regime infringes on the fundamental right to keep and bear arms[.]

She expanded on that [citations omitted]:

…a person who wants to keep an operable firearm must necessarily acquire ammunition. Because the right to keep and bear arms includes the right to keep operable arms, rules on ammunition acquisition implicate the plain text of the Second Amendment if they meaningfully constrain the right to keep operable arms.
We conclude that California’s ammunition background check meaningfully constrains the right to keep operable arms.

The 9th‘s ruling was on Rhode v Bonta, and it can be read here.

A Start

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Thomas Duesterberg, a Hudson Institute Senior Fellow, proposed five steps for our Federal government to take to address the People’s Republic of China’s economy and growing technological prowess. They form the foundation for a good start in countering that nation’s rise against us.

• tighten export controls on technology and expertise related to AI or national defense. …also coordinate export controls with allies on semiconductor production and equipment

This should be expanded to include sourcing the raw materials, intermediate processed components, and finished products of any type from sources outside the PRC.

• work with Congress to limit Chinese access to US financing, with stronger outward investment controls and limited access to listing on American stock exchanges

This should include enforcing existing requirements that any company, foreign or domestic, must meet to be listed on an American exchange. Chief among these are that those listed must subject themselves to stringent American accounting practices and audits. The current requirements vis-à-vis PRC-domiciled companies listed or seeking listing are under discussion with the PRC; however, there is nothing to discuss here: either those companies satisfy, or they must be delisted or cannot be listed in the first place.

• impose sanctions on Chinese banks. Washington has largely not pursued them, though reporting indicates Chinese banks have facilitated and financed illicit commerce such as technology transfer to Russia, drug trafficking, and money-laundering, as well as the purchase of sanctioned Iranian and Russian oil

• show Chinese tech companies reciprocity. China effectively bars most American firms from its markets by either forbidding them or making entry contingent on ridiculous requirements, such as revealing source code. Washington should bar firms tit-for-tat, especially in response to intellectual property transfers demands from China

Not tit-for-tat, as that would work in both directions: were the PRC to reduce or drop those restrictions, we would then need reciprocate. The mistakes here are two: one is that the PRC cannot be trusted to stop its parallel…sub rosa…thefts of our companies’ source code, intellectual property, technologies. The second mistake is that we should be doing no economic business with the PRC in the first place.

• enlist allies in the fight. The administration has competing foreign-policy priorities, but limiting China’s ability to compensate for losing the US market would measurably enhance success

President Donald Trump’s (R) protectionist tariffs against friends and allies and others work at cross purposes with his foreign policy tariffs against the PRC (and against Russia, Iran, and northern Korea, albeit for these three the moves primarily are sanctions). Leaving aside the broader counterproductive nature of protectionism, such tariffs are counterproductive by reducing or eliminating the targeted nations’ incentive to work with us against the PRC, even with the PRC’s inimical practical and operational moves toward those friends and allies, and others.

In fine, more is needed for Duesterberg’s proposals. The PRC is an avowed—by it—enemy nation, committed to overcoming us economically, militarily, and so politically. The sort of steps proposed by Duesterberg need to be broadened in reach to address the entirety of the PRC economy, which would directly limit that nation’s military growth and improvement as well as its technology growth and improvement, which would indirectly limit its military. That, in turn, would limit its ability to overcome us politically.

There is, though, only so much our government can do by itself. Our private enterprises, small, medium, large, and international, need also to recognize the enmity the PRC has toward us and to recognize how much their own interactions with the PRC and with PRC-domiciled companies facilitate the PRC’s effort to dominate us. They need to move apace in withdrawing from those interactions and find non-PRC related sources for their production, from ores to processed ores to components for assembly to finished products. They need also to stop aiding and abetting the PRC through helping it develop its own technology base.