For decades our company worked with Chinese in China. In one collaboration, we took about eight years to build a start-up wind blade maker from scratch into a US$1.8 billion company, the second-largest in the world. In that and other Sino-foreign joint ventures, we worked directly with top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) sole supplier of military aircraft.
However, as Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) began dominating CCP politics and darkening US-China ties, the CCP’s largest defense contractor breached our agreement in the US and set off litigation that went all the way to the US Supreme Court. In that fight, one of the CCP’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, US President Joe Biden’s administration can raise guard rails to reduce military tensions around Taiwan and revive prosperity’s prospects around the world. Broadly, our brawl with CCP-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 US administration must add consequences to its rhetoric. It is not enough to describe CCP activity as provocative. It must state and stick to consequences for CCP behavior. For instance, it could tie increases in US military assistance to Taiwan to CCP actions against Taiwan. The CCP directs its military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), to fly its warplanes almost daily into Taiwanese airspace.
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 US 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. It also knows what and how long Taiwan flies to address PLA provocations. Using these parameters, the US government can establish an easy-to-understand, formulaic consequence for PLA taunts, and commit the US to funding an amount equal to the accumulated and calculated costs of flights by the PLA and the Taiwanese military.
Funding this commitment creates several advantages. Immediately, it sets, or imposes, a behavior-based cost on the PLA that the CCP can control. If the CCP 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 US, it could avoid spending many multiples of the expense it would incur following lethal PLA attacks on Taiwan. Comparably, if before Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the US had sent a fraction of what it has sent since, Washington might have thwarted Putin’s invasion before it started.
Of course, instituting this policy would incur the wrath of Xi and his supporters. Context and history can help counter the certain criticism.
To start, the Biden administration should state the US’ objective and invite the CCP 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 US. History recounts Americans’ sacrifices to support Chinese dreams for a better life. In World War II, Americans died to support Chinese security and ambitions. The Doolittle Raiders attacked China’s invader. Following their raid, US combat forces might have lost more lives for the benefit of Chinese than the CCP’s PLA. In the succeeding decades, the US toiled to construct the global infrastructure that provided CCP companies access to international markets and allowed them to reliably raise revenues.
Three “300s” illustrate this point: First: Trusting Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) and his CCP acolytes’ promises, US leadership opened Chinese access to global markets. This embrace raised more than 300 million Chinese out of poverty. Yes, those people had to work hard, but, for them to escape poverty, their employers had to reach international markets. The US and aligned countries created the commercial, logistical and political environments that made that possible.
Second: For the past decade, US investors have provided more than US$300 billion of cash infusions — or more than US$3 trillion over the past 10 years — into the Chinese economy.
Third, US taxpayers annually unwittingly provide more than US$300 billion of intellectual property (IP) to CCP entities. For example, in 2010, a freshly minted doctoral student, Liu Ruopeng (劉若鵬), took IP developed at Duke University and formed a company, Kuang-Chi Science and Technology Co, in China that is valued at more US$8 billion.
On this point, the US administration can pivot from CCP corruption to US 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 CCP uses laws to protect a political party from the people it oppresses. It jails pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong, such as tycoon Jimmy Lai (黎智英), persecutes Uighurs in Xinjiang for their faith and culture, and kidnaps innocent people such as Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig for ransom. Examples abound, but for the CCP, 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 US and Taiwan share aligned views of respecting individual lives and liberties. As long as the CCP takes a contrary view and threatens individuals’ rights, it should count on the US to stand with Taiwan.
Patrick Jenevein is CEO of Pointe Bello, a Dallas-based strategy design and implementation firm.
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