Hi there.
It’s no secret that I’m far from a fan of Donald Trump. But one thing he did succeed at was elevating the national conversation about growing competition from China. (However, his approach to countering that competition was disastrous.) I mentioned a few weeks ago that China has been increasingly hostile towards Taiwan; today, I want to make sure we have a clear understanding of the entire situation with China, as well as how the US is responding.
The truth is, there’s a lot less nuance needed to discuss China compared to our conversations around Israel and Palestine. The Chinese Communist Party is an unambiguously repressive, anti-democratic regime that is actively committing genocide against the Uyghurs, an indigenous Muslim population. But if you want to know what China is really like for those who aren’t being victimized by genocide or forced labor, Harvard Business Review ran a comprehensive primer earlier this year: reporting on common misconceptions, examining American dependence on Chinese goods, diving into the country’s technological innovations, and explaining how China is a far more capitalist country than the West tends to give it credit for.
It’s hard to overstate just how powerful China has become in the last decade. The New York Times shows that the CCP has an outsized influence on international Internet companies. Another NYT piece reports on exactly how they have managed to strong-arm Apple. Yet another NYT article explains how China has assumed complete dominance of the electric vehicle market, despite an American company, Tesla, taking the industry mainstream.
It’s in vogue now for American liberals (myself included) to be more critical than ever of American imperialism. And it’s true, we are not the perfect nation we often try to present ourselves as. We may have been the founders of modern democracy, but today, we have one of the weakest democratic systems in the free world. We recently witnessed a coup attempt, fomented, if not led, by our own President. Our foreign policy agenda has left Central America and the Middle East in shambles. We incarcerate more domestic citizens than any other nation on the planet. Our police kill their own citizens at higher rates than most nations. Our education has fallen out of the top twenty.
And yet, it’s still true that we’re an order of magnitude better than China. And when we fail to compete, the rest of the world is forced to rely on China rather than the US. And that leads to a CCP that cannot easily be checked for its transgressions. Thankfully, as the NYT reports, a majority of our Congress seems to recognize all of this, and they’re preparing to pass a rare bipartisan bill to increase federal R&D spending in some sectors that China is beginning to monopolize. As the American Enterprise Institute shows, this sort of investment was critical to American innovation in the twentieth century, and will be just as important in the decades to come. But Vox notes that the bill about to be passed, while a great first step, is awfully watered down by Republicans afraid to spend ambitiously. In the 1960s, the US spent 2% of its GDP on this sort of investment. Today, it spends just 0.65% and the new bill will increase that, at most, to 0.85%. China, meanwhile, spends 1.3% of its GDP on these types of projects. We have to do more if we want to keep up.
The stakes are high in all of this. One field China hasn’t been able to control has been semiconductors, a technology important both economically and militarily. That’s likely one of the primary reasons for its increasing antagonism of Taiwan, home to one of the biggest semiconductor manufacturers in the world. And they’re rapidly modernizing their nuclear arsenal. That’s why both the NYT’s Thomas Friedman and the Washington Post’s David Ignatius recently painted a dire picture of looming war if we don’t act prudently.
One last China note: Newsweek recently commemorated the fifty-year anniversary of “ping-pong diplomacy,” the table tennis event that helped normalize American relations with China in the early 1970s.
In other news, the NYT looks at the state of the Democratic Party as their most ambitious goals have come crashing back down to earth. Axios has the latest developments on the January 6 storming of the Capitol. Buzzfeed reports on internal efforts to diversify congressional staffs. The NYT breaks down emerging not-in-my-backyard opposition to offshore wind farms. A recent New Yorker column considers the Supreme Court’s decision to hear a Mississippi abortion law. The Associated Press reports that the Supreme Court issued a rare unanimous ruling to tamp down on illegal immigration. The NYT reports on a controversial decision by the Merrick Garland-led Department of Justice to defend Donald Trump in a defamation lawsuit. Another NYT piece examines controversy at Yale Law School. New reporting from Time reveals the extent of Iranian efforts to sow misinformation in America. The NYT investigates how the online world was affected by Donald Trump’s ban from most social media platforms. The NYT’s Kara Swisher takes Mark Zuckerberg to task. And the AP reports on the recent Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack.
Lastly, I recently read the fabulous book Why Fish Don’t Exist. It functions several levels: an ode to the philosophy of chaos; a biography of Stanford University’s first president, the scientist David Starr Jordan; a memoir of self-discovery; and a dive into the world of taxonomy. Bonus: It’s a very quick read. I read it in a week, but faster readers could probably devour it in a day. Cheers to that.
Thank you for caring enough to read.
Be safe. Drink water. You are loved.
Talk to you tomorrow.