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News Analysis
The coronavirus pandemic that has been unleashed by the Chinese Communist Party-led People’s Republic of China, bringing death and financial devastation across the world, may have one silver lining, a leading human rights advocate said this week.
Marion Smith, Executive Director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), a non-profit organization created by Congress in 1993, told The Epoch Times that in the end, the crisis is creating “an unprecedented level of strong political will to make sure that our country is independent of China.”
Not only is political will surging, Smith said, the pandemic is motivating the American consumer, as well.
“Free enterprise relies on public sentiment and consumer will, and that has shifted against the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.
Out of the misery that the CCP-Virus has wrought upon China experts agree that the pandemic is sparking a process that will decouple the United States from its dependence on Chinese manufacturing.
Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,”, told The Epoch Times that “it would be nice if government and the private sector” could work together in a partnership to extract American business from China. Unfortunately, that likelihood is low.
“Most industries are going to want to stay in China,” Chang said. U.S. President Donald Trump may have to influence industry to do what it should do, Chang suggested.
The message should be clear. “Get out of China,” Chang said.
Decoupling Is Necessary
Chang said that the first industry that needs to come back to the United States is the pharmaceutical and medical supplies industry.
Americans have been shocked to learn, as a result of the pandemic, that up to 90 percent of the prescriptions in their medicine cabinets are filled by drugs made in China.
Technology, electronics, and telecommunications should follow suit and leave China on the heels of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, Chang suggested.
Retired Air Force Brigadier General Rob Spalding, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, and architect of the most recent National Security Strategy (NSS), agrees with Chang’s assessment.
Spalding added that specifically the manufacture of microelectronics and semiconductors, even those not necessarily manufactured in China yet also not being manufactured in the United States, needs to be repatriated to American soil. That includes those being manufactured in Taiwan and elsewhere.
Other key sectors that have to return to America, according to Spalding, include steel, refining capacity, rare earth metals, and aluminum.
In fact, he continued, many of the basic areas in which America needs to rebuild its capability and capacity are laid out in China’s own Made in China 2025 blueprint.
Issued by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in 2015, Made in China 2025 is a strategic Chinese government plan to upgrade China’s manufacturing abilities in carefully-curated industries. Those industries cover ten sectors.
Information technology and robotics are key on the list, both with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI).
Transport, even to the stars, is covered by the plan’s goal to become the world leader in green energy and vehicles, high-tech railway equipment, cutting-edge aerospace equipment, and ocean engineering and state-of-the-art ships.
Equipment and machinery in the essential sectors of power and agriculture are designated on the Made in 2025 list, which is rounded out by a renewed focus on new materials, and medicine and medical devices.
This list, says Spalding, should serve as a template for much of what America needs to urgently bring back to its shores.
Costs of Decoupling
Chang is under no illusions that decoupling the American economy from China will come with high costs.
“Let me put it this way,” Chang said.
“There are no longer any no-cost solutions. If anyone thinks that we can get out of decades of misguided China policy without cost, they’re wrong.”
“There will be high costs,” he added.
But, Chang said, “We have no choice.”
“China has declared itself to be an enemy of the United States and we have to respond.”
Chang is referring to a statement made by the Chinese government at the height of the trade war breakdown in negotiations in May 2019 declaring that China is in a “people’s war” with the United States.
That language has particular resonance in China.
The concept of a war prosecuted by the whole of the Chinese people emanates from a series of 1938 lectures given by Mao Zedong in which he describes China’s war of resistance against Japan.
Saying that China had to “mobilize the whole people to unite as one man and carry on the war with unflinching perseverance,” Mao said that the country had to “sweep away all pessimism and ideas of compromise, promote the will to hard struggle and apply new wartime policies, and so to weather the hardships.”
Decoupling Is Inevitable
Companies such as Apple will take some time to disassemble their complex supply chains and remove them from China, the analysts agree.
But “a lot of companies will make voluntary actions,” VOC’s Smith thinks.
Companies realize, he said, that “the glory days are over.” It’s “obvious that there is not a level playing field in China.”
Driving decoupling will be consumers, Smith said.
Consumer campaigns to stop buying Chinese-made goods are going to have an effect, he believes.
And incidents such as the backlash from China over comments made by the NBA’s Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey supporting the Hong Kong protesters do not escape public notice. China responded to Morey’s tweet by asking NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to fire Morey.
The incident was compounded by the NBA’s initial statement on the case, in which, Smith said, “the NBA humiliated themselves” by functionally apologizing to China, rather than standing up for free speech, a stance that Silver only later reversed after drawing criticism and condemnation from the likes of Senator Ted Cruz and others.
Now, with China’s lies about the “completely preventable” pandemic that has been caused by the CCP-virus, along with the government’s “predatory behavior” in scooping up personal protective equipment (PPE) from around the world, Americans have had enough, Smith believes.
“I think,” he said, “that there’s a real sentiment among Americans that the Chinese Communist Party needs to suffer.” “There needs to be consequences,” he added.
In the end, “we are going to have a more complete decoupling than most people thought was possible,” Smith said.
Chang hopes so.
“The point is that we’re not driving this,” Chang said. “The regime has shown inherent hostility to the United States.”
Some industries can leave China very quickly, he believes. His own experience as a lawyer advising a company that left China for southeast Asia after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 showed him how quickly some companies can re-tool in new locations.
Overall, “this is a critical thing for us to do. We should stop enriching China. We should not be enriching any country that bears us such hostility and ill-will.”
A Choice of Models
Decoupling from China may force the Chinese Communist Party to come to grips with true market reforms that they have been promising to make for decades, Spalding said.
“Everyone says that Deng Xiaoping opened the door to market-based reforms,” he continued.
But really, Deng, China’s paramount leader during most of the 1980s and 1990s, opened the door “to resources and capital that government can provide” to Chinese business and industry.
“There’s no way to compete with that,” Spalding added. The result is an economy that “is not centrally planned, but is centrally resourced.
“The only ones who can compete are large conglomerates,” Spalding said. “What that has done is destroy industry in the United States.”
“If we stay coupled,” he continued, we could be “allowing China to drive us to their model.”
“Decoupling is absolutely critical to maintain our democracy,” Spalding urged.
“It’s unfortunate to decouple from any country,” Chang said. “There could be very disadvantageous geopolitical consequences.”
But “if people are concerned about this, they don’t need to call 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW,” he said, referring to the address of the White House in Washington, D.C. “If people are concerned, they need to call Zhongnanhai.”
Zhongnanhai is the walled compound on the western side of the Forbidden City in the heart of Beijing where Chinese leaders from Xi Jinping down live.
This article is from the Internet:Decoupling From China Is Necessary and Inevitable, Say Experts
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