President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on July 15 criticized the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for allowing big comprador groups to dominate cross-strait relations while the party was in power. The US has had similar problems, something US President Donald Trump is trying to put an end to.
Before Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Buenos Aires at the end of this month on the sidelines of a G20 summit, there have been dark undercurrents and crossed swords beneath the surface of the US-China trade dispute, leading to relentless pressure from Wall Street on the White House.
Peter Navarro, director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, in a speech on Friday last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, lashed out at Wall Street billionaires who place their personal interests above national interests.
For Navarro, this “self-appointed group of Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers” on the one hand mislead the US public and obscure facts by incessantly disseminating the idea of a “self-harming” trade war, while performing “shuttle diplomacy” between the US and Beijing.
According to Navarro, these globalist elites are, in effect, “unpaid foreign agents.”
Trump “didn’t need the help of Wall Street, he didn’t need the help of Goldman Sachs and he doesn’t need it now,” Navarro said.
Navarro, known for his hawkish stance against China, specifically mentioned Goldman Sachs as he waved his sword at the primary target, US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, a moderate trade adviser and former Goldman Sachs executive.
Mnuchin has been calling for a peaceful end to the trade spat to the extent that he even proposed ceasing US arms sales to Taiwan.
A similar individual is former US secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson, who, while serving as chairman and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, made the firm a ton of money by handling the overseas listing of several major Chinese state-run companies.
Goldman earned almost US$10 billion simply by investing in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.
Paulson was recruited by former US president George W. Bush and, during his time in the government, pushed for the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue.
Paulson was second only to former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger as a member of the pro-China faction in Washington and, even after he left the government, has been a frequent guest of the powers-that-be in Beijing.
Kissinger and Paulson attended the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore on Tuesday and Wednesday last week, as did Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan (王岐山) in a rare appearance, something generally regarded as having been meticulously arranged by Wall Street.
This was yet another round of lobbying following a lack of progress, despite much fanfare, of a cross-national, high-level entourage beating its way to Beijing in September to attend the China-US Financial Roundtable.
China’s old tricks of infiltration, recruiting retired officials, creating unofficial channels to skirt official ones, and mobilizing members of the business community and designated media outlets to speak for it have resurfaced in Taiwan and the US.
China is seeking to commandeer marginal individuals — outside of the main decisionmaking institutions in Taiwan — whose positions are increasingly at odds with mainstream public opinion, but the US government can see right through these tactics.
In his opening remarks at the Bloomberg forum, Paulson made comments that were clearly at odds with opinions he had previously expressed, saying things like “China is viewed ... not just as a strategy challenge to America, but as a country whose rise has come at our expense” and “a growing number of [US] firms have given up hope that the playing field will ever be level.”
He also said that, following its entry into the WTO, China has not changed its behavior regarding overseas businesses.
The change in tone had many observers saying that Paulson’s views had been influenced by Navarro’s hawkish rhetoric.
If even an “old friend” of the Chinese like Paulson can speak like this — and if the Beijing authorities do not address the root causes of the problem by fulfilling their promises of opening up the market and establishing a climate of fair competition, but instead seek to revert to old tricks — then they are seriously going to misread overtures by the Trump administration aiming to thaw the current tensions.
Chen Yung-chang is deputy secretary-general of the Taipei Chamber of Commerce.
Translated by Chang Ho-ming and Paul Cooper
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