This week, the Chinese government announced its fierce opposition to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., visiting Taiwan. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said that China was “fully prepared…If the U.S. is bent on going its own way, China will take firm and strong measures to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.” In response, the Biden administration announced its discomfort with Pelosi’s visit: Biden told journalists that military officials thought the trip was “not a good idea.”
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Chinese government had accelerated its push to restore the manufacture of semiconductors. According to the Journal, “China is leading the world in building new chip factories, a step toward achieving more self-sufficiency in semiconductors that could eventually make some buyers reliant on China for many of the basic chips now in short supply.” That news ought to be disquieting for those who understand the flow of semiconductors, the single most important commodity on the planet, a component of nearly every major technology used today. Taiwan manufactures approximately 92% of advanced semiconductors; South Korea manufactures nearly all of the rest.
China’s dependence on foreign semiconductors is one of the world’s best hedges against Chinese attacks on Taiwan: should China attack Taiwan, Taiwan could destroy its semiconductors and infrastructure. But if China can ramp up its own domestic manufacture while everyone else is behind, China is in a solid position to blackmail the world economy in the same way Russia has using its energy supply.
And China isn’t unaware of their growing advantage. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Chinese have become far more aggressive in recent years; international relations expert Shi Yinhong, who works at Beijing’s Renmin University, told the Associated Press that China “will take unprecedented tough measures and the U.S. must make military preparations” if Pelosi should visit.
So, what ought the West to do?
First, the United States must stop acting as though China will change its tack any time soon. Xi Jinping has upped the ante over recent months in advance of his next party congress; he is likely to continue upping the ante as his economic and demographic model turns upside down. The long-term future for China is dismal: China’s economy is a paper tiger rooted in debt, and China simply doesn’t have the population growth necessary to support its massive spending. This means that China sees its window for action closing.
Second, the United States must realize it is already in a Cold War II with the Chinese government. This means ramping up our own domestic economic capacity — unleashing the economy through deregulation, energy production and tax reduction; refunding the military at the levels necessary to sustain a two-front war, and rebuilding the navy, which has shrunk to ship numbers lower than the United States had preceding World War II; diversifying supply chains for goods and services necessary to the United States, reshoring those supply chains away from China; and cutting off China’s access to cutting-edge technologies.
This also means that the United States must refocus its energy and ire externally rather than internally. Americans have expended an enormous amount of time, money and energy on attacking one another, on turning inward; the result has been a cancerous politics that results in the continuing dissolution of our social capital. During the Cold War, most Americans understood that the enemy wasn’t at home, it was the communist tyranny threatening the U.S. and her allies; during Cold War II, Americans must learn the same lesson again.
Ben Shapiro, 38, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author; his latest book is “The Authoritarian Moment: How The Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent.”
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Honestly, the United States has been in a cold war with China for the last 35 years. Our elected leaders have just chosen to pretend everything was fine. Aside from the Trump administration, virtually every other administration in that time frame, both Democrat and Republican, has chosen to ignore that reality and pretend “At some point if we open up enough of our economy, with little to no preconditions for that unfettered access to China, they will cast off communism and adopt capitalism.”
What has instead happened is the United States transferred tens of millions of jobs to China. Whole sectors of our economy moved overseas. We transferred nearly our entire manufacturing base for almost we consume in this country to China and Southeast Asia and allowed China to steal our IP at every turn with no consequences. We also simply handed our IP to them via one-sided business “partnerships” where the Chinese gain access to our IP as a condition of being able to open a business in China. Through the incredibly bad and stupid political decisions made in Washington over the last 35 years, we ended up enriching the CCP with tens of trillions of dollars over that time frame to raise China up from a starving, near bankrupt nation to the second most powerful nation on the planet both economically and militarily.
The China we face today is the direct result of a long series of bad decisions made in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere around the world by starry-eyed politicians with dollar signs in their eyes. We created the adversary we now face, but even today many of our elected officials still think the best approach to China is to keep deferring to them on every front and hope something magical happens along they to make the CCP act differently. The delusional approach to foreign policy. In the real world, that is called stupidity and we can no longer afford to have stupid people in Washington calling the shots.
I can understand why anyone would not be pleased about Pelosi making a seemingly political visit to a neighboring Nation. But I truly believe most Americans probably believe it would be a plus if Pelosi visited Taiwan (or anywhere outside US territory) and stayed for a very, very, very, very, very long visit … ideally a long enough visit so she could not participate in US governance. On the other hand, China is probably upset that she is not staying in the US to continue Communizing US governance as she has in past years. But if I were Taiwan government officials, I would not permit her to visit anyway, since Taiwan governance has not cow towed to China-type Communism governance since its inception. Pelosi is a scary governance representative to any true democracy.
All true. And Cold CW2 has been raging for 18 months against the American Citizens.
Some have understood it for a very long time. They are usually the ones with no economic ties to the CCP.
Lenin said something to the effect that communists would stand by and watch while the last two “capitalists” would fight with each other over who would be the one to sell the communists the rope they would use to hang the last “capitalist” with.
FOLKS, THIS IS WHAT IS GOING ON ALL OVER THE PLACE!!!!!
An ancient Chinese philosopher wrote a book. The point being how to win a war without firing a shot. Machiavelli likewise had that philosophy. Americans, especially Republicans, are too trusting and take things at face value. CCP plays triple level chess with a 100 year domination plan and USA gets nuts planning for 3 months!!!
While China maps out its strategy for taking over the world, we concern ourselves with what’s for dinner and choosing personal pronouns. One is serious, the other, oblivious to existential issues. If we insist on staying asleep at the wheel, we will lose our country. This is scary stuff.
The Chinese sense that the USA under the dominance of the Biden administration is ripe and ready to be had …. they know weakness and will take as much advantage of it as they can.