China has had tremendous economic growth and yet their air is toxic, and their rivers polluted. They dump their trash into the world’s oceans and don’t give a damn. We should tax their goods and brand it the Chinese carbon tax. You should not be able to poison the air in Shanghai so you can buy a penthouse in Manhattan.
Our political class has been so wrong about China because they were too busy getting rich to get smart. Only when we stop the former can we do the latter. How wrong have they been? Look at a few examples.
The internet will not make China free. Tim Wu’s book, The Master Switch, teaches us that while technology may start out naively libertarian, it always ends up centralizing power. All technology means is doing more with less. Technology doesn’t necessarily mean freedom. You can have more totalitarianism with less effort. That too is a sort of technological advance. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, they told us. The internet would inevitably make China move toward democracy. “Good luck,” President Clinton joked about Chinese efforts to censor the internet in March 2000. “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”
But the country that built the Great Wall had no problem nailing the proverbial Jell-O to it. Indeed, Chinese control of the internet bled into American companies as well, with YouTube censoring videos critical of the Chinese state. Google has even proposed working with the Chinese military instead of working with ours. “In China, there is pretty much only one rule, and it is simple: Don’t undermine the state. So titans like Weibo and Baidu heed censorship orders,” writes Raymond Zhong of the New York Times. “Unwanted beliefs and ideologies are kept out.”
Share the wrong meme or tweet the wrong thing and you and your family can be shut out of polite society through China’s social credit system, which bears an uncanny resemblance to Big Tech’s effort to shadowban and suspend American conservatives. The East German Stasi dreamed of such power, but in China, it is extremely routine. China’s walled-in tech world gives them serious advantages. When you have a billion people, you collect a lot of data. That data can be mined and trained through artificial intelligence. The insights gleaned can be weaponized without a human even passing judgment. You can build authoritarianism through algorithms.
Naturally, China seeks to expand its reach globally through its technology. Globalization is sinification, after all.
The Commerce Department has barred some forty or so companies from doing business here, including most famously Huawei. They need to ban a lot more, including TikTok and drone manufacturer DJI. Throw in BGI, who massively discount their genetic sequencing technology to build up a database of genomes for experimentation and analysis. Just as the China virus COVID-19 turns our immune system against our bodies, so too does the broader Chinese attack on America alter what is supposed to be good into evil.
We should restrict federal contracting to companies that have an anti-Chinese espionage policy and undergo background checks by the FBI. The Chinese cannot be allowed to use LinkedIn to spy on American companies as recently detailed by the New York Times. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are among a number of American companies that are still providing web services to blacklisted Chinese surveillance firms. That includes Zoom, which hosts its servers in China.
Fortunately, China has laid out their playbook for us. They are making state-directed investments in key areas in a way we would be wise to copy: artificial intelligence, genomics, and drone technology. We should take the Chinese seriously and take seriously what they say their aims are. We can frustrate their objectives precisely because they telegraph their punches and issue state directives. What they cannot learn they steal. What they cannot steal they bribe or buy. We must block these sales and undo the bad sales already done, particularly in the areas where the Chinese have expressed great interest. The Obama regime should never have allowed BGI to buy Complete Genomics, and we should not allow DJI or TikTok to compete in the United States.
We must keep secret our advances and even entertain classified patents. This’ll mean sourcing more technologies away from the universities and Big Tech, instead trusting and empowering American companies and engineers. We beat the Soviet Union by out-innovating them and by making sure we always kept the informational advantage. We can make so many impressive things that the Chinese can’t possibly steal it all, but we must see to it that the greatest minds of our generation are not wasted merely clicking ads or liking photos. Our best minds should be working on bold ideas for the national betterment—just as China’s already are.
It doesn’t matter whether you believe the Wuhan virus started in a lab or in the wet markets. China behaved negligently. Where China misbehaves, we should send our trial lawyers after them and map out what they own here. The Chinese elite—and they are all in the government over there—send their kids here and own property. That gives us leverage, though. We must never allow our children to be placed under house arrest by the Wuhan virus and made into de facto Uighurs, begging a high-tech central authority to be let out of their homes.
Free men and women breathe air that is both free and nontoxic, while their kids fish in clean rivers as they please. But to remain free, we must think clearly about the problems we face before it is too late. The price of freedom—and enduring American exceptionalism—is vigilance, not wishful storytelling.
CHAPTER TEN
Sports Fan
I love sports. My own baseball career ended early due to a lack of talent. Now in my late thirties, watching sports isn’t some nostalgic look back at “the glory days.” For me there were few to none. Sports allow those of us who grew up too fat, too slow, or too uncoordinated to admire talent in
