The view from Washington
Talk of a China threat cuts across the political divide
Last october bosses from some big, innovative companies were invited to an annexe of the White House. Amid the highceilinged pomp of the Indian Treaty Room, the executives signed one-day non-disclosure agreements allowing them to see classified material. Then the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, and two senators told them how China steals their secrets.
The unpublicised event was the idea of Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and himself a successful technology investor. He was joined by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican on the committee.
Recent arrests of alleged Chinese spies reveal only a small fraction of what is afoot, Mr Rubio says. China “is the most comprehensive threat to our country that it has ever faced”. The aim, he insists, is not to hold China down but to preserve peace. He sees an imbalance in relations between America and China that, if left unaddressed, “will inevitably lead to very dangerous conflict”.
Speaking with rapid precision in his Senate office, Mr Rubio criticises an economic model that presses chief executives to maximise short-term profits. China has learned to use that system to turn firms into “advocates”, he charges. Too often politicians would vow to get tough on Chinese cheating. “Then these ceos would be deputised by China to march down to the White House.”
Venture capitalists have also been invited to Warner-Rubio China road shows. Mr Rubio grumbles that the business plan of some Silicon Valley tech firms is to get bought up, without necessarily caring if the investors are Chinese.
Members of Congress have drafted proposals for a series of new export controls on products deemed important to national and economic security, notably from industries named as priorities in the “Made in China 2025” plan. That is a Chinese map for building world-beating companies in ten high-tech fields. Chinese investments face ever-tighter scrutiny by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (cfius). The Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernisation Act recently extended the remit of cfius to new areas, such as property purchases near sensitive sites. A pilot scheme mandates reviews of foreign stakes in a wide array of “critical technologies”. Mr Rubio names telecommunications, quantum computing, artificial intelligence and any industry that collects large data sets as ones he wants closed to China.
The staging of that October road show—a bipartisan endeavour involving Congress and the intelligence agencies, close to the White House but not inside it—is revealing. Views on China have hardened across official Washington. A tough new consensus unites what might be called America’s foreign-policy machine, including members of both parties in Congress, the State Department, Pentagon, Department of Justice, spy agencies and the president’s own National Security Council. The machine includes the vice-president, Mike Pence, who turned a speech last October into a charge sheet of Chinese misdeeds. Mr Trump stands apart.
Pentagon chiefs and members of Congress are ever more publicly sounding the alarm about China’s intentions towards Taiwan, the democratic island of 24m people that America calls an ally but China claims as its own, saying it must be united with the motherland, by force if necessary. To China’s disquiet, Congress has passed laws signalling solidarity with Taiwan, urging the government to allow cabinet secretaries and American warships to visit the island. Some of President Donald Trump’s closest aides are long-time advocates for Taiwan. As president-elect in 2016 he was persuaded to talk by telephone with the island’s president, Tsai Ing-wen. Since then Mr Trump has blocked proposals for high-profile visits to show support for Taiwan as a democratic ally. He sees allies as a burden, and mighty China as America’s peer.
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