Over decades our company worked with Chinese people in China. In one effort together, we took about 8 years to build a start-up wind blade maker from scratch into a $1.8 billion company, the 2nd largest in the world. In that and other Sino-foreign joint ventures, we worked directly with top leaders of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) sole supplier of military aircraft. As Xi Jinping began dominating CPC politics and darkening U.S.-China relationships, the CPC largest defense contractor breached our agreement in the United States and set off litigation that went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. In that fight, one of the CPC’s lawyers used an insult to belie the Party’s fear of our effectiveness. He wrote that we were “but a flyspeck on the Chinese radar screen.”
Leveraging lessons learned from flyspeck victories, the Biden Administration can raise guard rails to reduce military tensions around Taiwan and revive prosperity’s prospects around the world. Broadly, our brawl with CPC controlled enterprises illuminates the need to take resolute action, to stake positions firmly, and to demonstrate a willingness to fight for right.
More specifically, the administration must add consequences to its rhetoric. It’s not enough to describe CPC activity as provocative. It must state and stick to consequences for CPC behavior. One suggestion: Tie increases in U.S. military assistance for Taiwan to CPC actions against Taiwan. The CPC directs its military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), to fly hundreds of sorties almost daily against Taiwanese airspace. (PLA escalates drills near Taiwan to deter closer US ties, but analysts warn approach could backfire | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)) These actions use the PLA’s war machine to systematically degrade Taiwan’s defensive capabilities. Using its military power to systematically degrade another’s military is war.
The administration already monitors flight times and paths by type of PLA war plane. Fighters, bombers, reconnaissance, and other planes incur easy to calculate costs per flight hour. Operating Costs Calculator - AOPA It also knows what and how long Taiwan flies to address PLA provocations. Using these parameters alone, our government can establish an easy-to-understand, formulaic consequence for PLA taunts: Commit the United States to funding an amount equal to the accumulated and calculated costs of both PLA and Taiwanese Armed Forces flights.
Funding this commitment now creates several advantages. Immediately, it sets, or imposes, a behavior-based cost on the PLA that the CPC can control. If the CPC sends its PLA on fewer flights, it saves money. If it spends more to fly more, it also runs up more funding to the target it seeks to run down. Arithmetically, it more than doubles either the savings from not flying sorties or the costs of flying them. Financially, for the United States, it could avoid spending many multiples of the expense it would incur following lethal PLA attacks on Taiwan. Comparably, if before Putin invaded Ukraine, the United States had sent a fraction of what it has sent since, the United States may have thwarted Putin’s invasion before it started.
Of course, instituting this policy will incur Xi Jinping’s and his supporters’ wrath. Context and history can help counter the certain criticism.
To start, the administration should state the United States’ objective and invite the CPC to share that objective: Avoid military destruction and, instead, advance young men and women’s livelihoods through common economic prosperity.
This is nothing new for the United States. History recounts Americans’ sacrifices to support Chinese dreams for a better life. In World War II, Americans died to support Chinese people’s security and ambitions. The Doolittle Raiders attacked China’s invader. Following their raid, U.S. combat forces may have lost more lives for the benefit of Chinese people than the Communist Party’s PLA. In the succeeding decades, the United States toiled to construct the global infrastructure that provided CPC companies access to international markets and allowed them to reliably raise revenues.
Three “300s” illustrate this point. First: Trusting Deng Xiaoping and his CPC acolytes’ promises, U.S. leadership opened Chinese access to global markets. This embrace raised almost three times 300 hundred million Chinese people out of poverty. Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience (worldbank.org) Yes, those people had to work, but, for them to escape poverty, their employers had to reach international markets. The United States and aligned countries created the commercial, logistical, and political environments that made that possible. Second: For the past decade, U.S. investors have provided over $300 billion of cash infusions – or more than $3 trillion over the past 10 years – into China’s economy. March 19, 2021 Hearing Transcript (uscc.gov) Third: Also annually, U.S. taxpayers unwittingly provide over $300 billion of intellectual property to CPC entities. China Looks to Seize the 21st Century (senate.gov) In just one example from 2010, a freshly minted doctoral student, Liu Ruopeng (刘若鹏), took IP developed at Duke University and formed Kuang-Chi Science and Kuang-Chi Technology companies, in the PRC valued at over $8 billion. How one graduate student allegedly stole Duke research to create a billion-dollar Chinese company - The Chronicle (archive.org)
On this point, the administration can pivot from CPC corruption to U.S. conceptional values. American founders established laws to protect people from political parties and bullies. Even though we fail to perfectly achieve our ideals, Americans expect laws to protect our individual liberties, our personal American dreams.
In contrast, the CPC uses laws to protect a political party from the people it oppresses. It jails Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong for speaking openly, persecutes Uighurs genocidally in Xinjiang for their faith and culture, kidnaps innocents like Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig for ransom. Examples abound, but for the CPC, physical containment is not enough. It strives to do more than surveil and enchain its people. It asserts the power to direct their thoughts and dreams.
This simple difference in foundational principles of two countries leads to very different expectations of what a global future should look like. The United States and Taiwan share aligned views of respecting individual lives and liberties. As long as the CPC takes a contrary view and threatens individuals’ rights, it should count on the United States to stand with Taiwan.