American VC Firms Investing Billions into PRC Companies Fueling the CCP Military
selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov
selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov
The investor class argued that shutting down factories in the American Midwest (where almost none of the investors live, of course) and moving production to China would bring political liberalization to the nation. That's why the US didn't slam the door shut on China after Tienanmen Square with Bush 41, and why Bush 43 was supportive of China joining the WTO. Of course, they didn't liberalize, and now China's using its massive industrial base that Americans funded to increase its capabilities for a showdown with the US (and other Western nations) for global economic and political supremacy.
Really, it was all BS from the start; investors just didn't want to pay working-class Americans anymore and couldn't have cared less about the political implications of the market forces they were unleashing.
It's arguably treason.
First, It was Clinton, Bush 1, and Bush 2.
Secondly, this was because of how (then much richer) Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, Turkiye, and Eastern Europe democratized in the 1980s-90s.
With those priors, it made sense to assume that economic integration and growth leads to calls for democracy.
The jury's still out on this btw - China's median income in the 2020s is still 33-50% that of Thailand's, Mexico's, Poland's, Serbia's, and Turkiye's in the 2020s and these countries are still in the process of democratizing.
> didn't slam the door shut on China after Tienanmen Square
PRC was sanctioned by the US and the west in the 1990s in the aftermath of the massacre. This was why ascension happened so late.
People forget that before the 2000s, most foreign investors to China were mostly from South East Asia and Taiwan.
Western countries didn't enter until the mid-2000s.
The fact is, a large plurality of those holding capital today is not in favor of a market economy. Markets are hard. You have to compete. You have to keep customers happy. You have to constantly find the next big thing. You stand to lose a lot because everything I just mentioned includes a lot of risk by nature. These holders of capital are in fact far more in line with feudalism. Feudalism merged holders of monetary and political power into one entity: all of the economic value and capital were held by lords, who also had the ability to use the force of the state to marshal means of production to make more economic value for them at the exclusion of those who wanted to compete with the lords, or peasants/serfs who wanted more of the value they produced.
This is why many modern capital holders _love_ the People's Republic of China: they get to do what they want with the non-human means of production, and the CCP will use its authoritarian regime to make sure that the human means of production doesn't cause too much trouble. When Obama asked Steve Jobs why Apple didn't make the iPhone in the US, Jobs basically stated (and I'm paraphrasing here) that American producers wouldn't do whatever it took to make him happy. If he had a change he wanted on a piece of hardware, he could tell his suppliers to make it so immediately. There would be no dealing with labor unions, no dealing with environmental regulations, no dealing with health and safety. The CCP won't do that because these capital holders cut them in on the revenue at the expense of the society the CCP rules over.
100% in agreement with you.
Though by every single measure, China in 2023 hasn't reached the economic inflection point that Taiwan, South Korea, etc hit in the late 1980s-90s.
The key commonality between those countries that became democracies and those that didn't was inequality and economic stagnation.
Those that worked on rapidly decreasing inequality saw broad support for maintaining a Liberal instead of Illiberal Democracy (Eg. Taiwan, South Korean, Poland recently, etc) whereas those who saw economic stagnation after proto-democratization fell to Illiberal Democracy or Authoritarianism (Eg. Hungary, Russia, Turkiye, Thailand, etc).
This is because of the "devil you know" fallacy that becomes justified if democracy or proto-democracy hasn't return any results.
China is in a weird position where it's able to compete with Advanced Economies in certain fields, but by most standards is still a developing country. You can have Beijing have first world level standards, but Tibet have living standards comparable to the poorer states of India.
> modern capital holders _love_ the People's Republic of China: they get to do what they want with the non-human means of production
Then why move manufacturing to less authoritarian Mexico, India, Thailand, etc or equally authoritarian Vietnam?!?
Why not continue manufacturing in North Korea like South Korean companies used to do?
This is a fallacy that ignores the reality of operational margins and capacity.
Uhh no https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/thailand/annual-househ...
Regarding "democratization" I'd say again that the most effective killers of Chinese democracy movement are Pompeo and Trump.
The median household income in Thailand is around $7,000 [0] versus around $4,000 [1] in China - both are government provided statistics.
> Regarding "democratization" I'd say again that the most effective killers of Chinese democracy movement are Pompeo and Trump
In a way, but more so the economic stagnation and massive inequality towards the end of the Hu Jintao era as the Bo Xilai scandal proved.
[0] - http://statbbi.nso.go.th/staticreport/page/sector/th/08.aspx
[1] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202201/t202201...
Also, Thai B1/2 refusal rates are significantly lower than Chinese B1/2 rates (B1/2 is largely judged based on economic capacity) and Thailand doesn't even have an exit pass requirement.
Also, Thai citizens can travel to SK and JP visa free but Chinese can't, which further proves the point.
> prices seem lower in Bangkok than even a tier 3 city in China
Because of housing. After the Housing Market crash happened in 1997 due to overbuilding, Thailand has a severe deflationary period similar to what China is facing today.
Most Western FMCGs in ASEAN are also manufactured in Thailand and don't have a luxury tax (0% in Thailand versus 30-40% in China), which has helped keep prices low.
This and the large Chinese Thai community is why Thailand became a popular tourist destination for middle class Chinese before COVID
[0] - https://www.nso.go.th/nsoweb/storage/survey_detail/2023/2023...
Eitherway, housing price makes some sense, but this data still feels off, considering PRC is at 65% urbanization vs Thai 50%, and neither urban nor rural thai measures up to urban or rural PRC from my travels.
In 2022, 22% of Chinese B1/2 applicants overstayed in the US versus 8% of Thai applicants [0].
That is a massive discrepancy, and hard to attribute for any other reason except economic.
The primary factor to getting a B1/2 visa is proof that you will not overstay in the US or become a Ward of State
> SK/JP VISA free travel seems like a strange indicator to back up assertion
Because SK and JP grant tourist visas based on overstay risks and proof of income as well. That's why much poorer Vietnam doesn't have visa free travel to JP or SK despite having extremely permissive FTAs with both countries.
> without VISA there'd be more low income travellers from PRC, but that's something airline supply/demand will filter out
Or, you know, visa free status and overstay rates by country.
> Eitherway, housing price makes some sense, but this data still feels off, considering PRC is at 65% urbanization vs Thai 50%, and neither urban nor rural thai measures up to urban or rural PRC from my travels.
Well, firstly, Chinese urbanization rates seem to be miscounted upwards, as Tsinghua noted [1] for 2019 and earlier data. The Chinese numbers are closer to 50-55%.
Secondly, rural and urban incomes are starkly different in Thailand versus China, as both countries government released statistics have shown, and even Thailand's National and Local HDI statistics have proven.
There's no way around it, the average Thai (who lives a rural or semi-rural life) has a better quality of life than the average Chinese person (who also lives a rural or semi-rural life)
[0] - https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-07/23_0707_FY22...
[1] - https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/CPE-10-2...
PRC ~0.8%
Thailand ~2%
PRC overstays in other tables also lower, frequently substantially.
Maybe geopolitics changed between US/PRC since 2018?
https://cis.org/sites/default/files/2020-01/19_0417_fy18-ent...
You're a well read guy, but I find some of your use of data in this thread to be a little confusing.
E: Tsinghua study is about reclassifying based on household registeration, rural registered working in urban does not have access to urban level of social support, so less people should be considered urban even though they contribute to urban agglomeration effects. Which is what we think about when we measure urbanization. But it's not about whether rural PRC has less QoL than rural thai. Which sure, household income and HDI measures as proxy. But then tack on all the redistribution mechanisms, i.e. social transfers in kind where state subsidizes take home income and see it in practice and I find it difficult to believe (from what I see travelling both places, granted anedotal) average Thai has better QoL on when PRC per is 80% larger and per capita accounts for redistributed resources that supplements disposable income.
> Maybe geopolitics changed between US/PRC since 2018?
With worse geopolitics, you'd have fewer Chinese illegally overstaying their Visitor Visa (which by definition is illegal immigration). This is why there was a drop in H1/F1 category applications from China.
There is no reason to overstay a visitor visa except undocumented work, especially since they are granted with 1-2 year blocks.
If you had legal work status, you'd be granted a H1B/H2B.
If you came for education, you'd be granted an F1.
If you have a degree and a great lawyer, you'd be granted an O1.
If you have millions of USD, you'd be granted an EB5
If you came for marriage, you would be granted a K1
I see the gov stats youre posting, but this is where my personal experience find it divorced from ground reality. HDI sure, rural PRC education probably shittier, health care access questionable, but household stuff and general development in urban/rural as proxy for income, PRC seems much better than Thailand.
Which is a mark of desperation.
Why are similarly large numbers of Thai nationals not doing the same?
Nothing you say is disproving my larger point.
You aren't going to pay cartels to traffic you into the US if all you want to do is sight see in NYC.
> Conversely 2022 data doesn't explain why data before US-PRC relations collapsed were overstaying less than Thais.
I agree. Which is why the geopolitical argument you propose doesn't make sense.
> personal experience find it divorced from ground reality
I don't know your ground reality. But if you are on this forum, you probably live or lived in a T1 city working a high income white collar job in the booming Chinese tech industry.
Most Chinese aren't.
And this is where the difference comes in.
Beijing and Tianjin are great QoL wise when you earn a high income, yet neighboring Hebei has been fairly impoverished for a long time.
Not as bad as previously ofc. Yet much worse than Pathan Thani or Ayutthaya (the Thai equivalent of Hebei).
Hell, if you travel to Isaan, the Thai version of Guizhou or Gansu, the difference between the two is stark.
I have traveled thru Hebei, Beijing, etc in the late 2010s as I have traveled Isan, BKK, and Ayutthaya as well in Thailand.
> HDI sure, rural PRC education probably shittier, health care access questionable, but household stuff and general development in urban/rural as proxy for income, PRC seems much better than Thailand
So, ignoring the stats that calculate life for the average person, not the top 20-30%.
There's a lot more PRC people so you would get more desperate people. Desperate people want to goto US. Desperate Thais without VISA drama just go and overstay, and they've historically overstayed more than PRC when US didn't crack down on PRC VISA. That's the control. Post VISA drama, the amount of PRC who are trying to sneak into US vs net drop in PRC who travel to US is drop in bucket, 30k wants to go, but 1M+ simply choose to forgo. Under previous control circumstances, PRC who wants to goto US and illegally overstay just... fly to US or Can and overstay, same method as Thais, but at less % than Thai. Hence it's geopolitics of VISA changes driving increased VISA changes. Because the people paying the snake heads also seem to be T2 / middle income tier, i.e. they have to be resourced to make the trip in the first place, and they have the opportunity to go because PRC influence in LATAM (triad) have setup good asylum schemes because US state sucker for PRC repression story. They're as much desperate as they are opportunists because geopolitcs has made asylum claims another avenue for getting into US.
> live or lived in a T1 city
I lived in T1, but I travelled T2/T3 where family are, including even worse bumfuck nowhere rust belt in the north. I see the differences. QoL in these places were still better than what I experienced in rural Thai (away from tourist areas), i.e. Isaan being better than Guizhou and Gansu I find not credible. Well I mean obviously Isann is much better than Gansu as a tourist. Rural Isaan was much more pleasant but people in rural Gansu has more stuff. Which leads to:
> stats
Stats for development, not stats for broad QoL, which HDI can be proxy indicator but doesn't capture full Qol reality, i.e. I replied with edit above, there's all sorts of additional social transfer / subsidies from central gov to PRC backwaters that supplement income and make QoL for your undereducated peasant/nongming better than disposable income would suggest. They have less HDI QoL but better actual QoL, which is what matters because padding their resumes with education that they're too old to make productive use of is dumb use or resources than just subsidize their income with modern infra, consumption and services. A lot of that doesn't get captured in disposable income and HDI. But it adds up substantially when gov has 5000 more per capita to play various fiscal transfers with, especially if they use to specifically to uplift bottom quantile.
"In 2021, the per capita disposable income of residents in China reached 35,128 yuan, a nominal increase of 9.1 percent over the previous year".
This is why I equally distrust Statisa for similar reasons.
Use primary sources instead of secondary sources as they say.
[0] - https://www.nso.go.th/nsoweb/storage/survey_detail/2023/2023...
If I can give some feedback, this last line undermines the rest of your points. Not everything selfish is treason.
These companies tossed the heavy manufacturing capabilities of the United States to a geopolitical rival. To be clear: there is no China with superpower ambitions if the American shareholder class hadn't made it happen.
I would like to see this broken down by decile over time; I suspect that doing so would show a shift favoring higher income deciles and disfavoring lower income deciles. If Bill Gates eats at a restaurant, the median net worth of the restaurant's customers makes them billionaires. But that doesn't mean they are all that well off. The same is true for income and for the US population.
But for it to be considered treason they would have to committed that act with the intent of betraying the United States for their enemies. I think you will have a hard time showing that was their intent when a much more obvious and likely intent was making a profit.
If you take out the intent part of treason then it would apply to all sorts of scenarios and would severely restrict the freedom of US citizens. For instance would you consider a US citizen who is loyal to the United States but takes a year to volunteer at an Iranian hospital to be committing treason? What about a US factory worker who strikes for better working conditions and the strike gives an advantage to a Chinese competitor?
The decrease has been far from marginal. You don't get an increasing amount of political extremism from marginal changes in economic fortunes. You get them from a ton of alienation, desperation, and despair.
The strategy at that point is better comparative advantage. Education, capital improvements, infrastructure. Protectionism doesn't generate value .
Not saying it's overall beneficial but it likely pushes the working class towards other areas like infotech and more specialized trades which could lead to innovation in those spaces.
Creates a trade dependency however.
Information technology was great for a handful of states - well, cities, really; I can't help but notice the lack of a MacOS Bakersfield - but not across the geography of the United States. The capital concentrated in those areas to an absurd extent. During the low interest rate days, VCs in these areas were far more likely to invest in an absolutely terrible idea within a fifty-mile radius of their offices than they were to invest in a good idea 800 miles away. They also drastically overvalue businesses that can throw on a thin whitewash of "tech company" on an otherwise-conventional business model, even if the execution of that business model does poorly in actually producing value for the non-shareholder parts of the market economy.
was great for a handful of states - well, cities, really
All of which these areas lack because of revenue structuring that makes it impossible for them to pay for it.
Congress doesn't carve out that much money to make sure that some kid in rural Missouri actually has what he needs from schooling to compete in the global economy. Even if they did, you'd have some conservative super PAC-funded state level politician arguing against it because it's "a way for out of touch Washington bureaucrats to attack local traditional values".
Just opening up that cash, even if super PAC blocks it's reuse as tax, works wonders at an individual level at improving infrastructure.
Remember China is not the ally of the US.
You don’t ship fentanyl and other synthetic drugs to a country you are friends with.
China actively works to disrupt the US. They only go as far as they currently think they can get away with.
For a given meaning of adversary it is, for others it isn't, clearly the line in the sand at least for the US is when they are at war, arguably when a trade ban happens if we want to be a bit more relaxed with definitions. If you do disagree and believe the line in the sand encompasses china the real worry should not be a "measly" 3 billion from random VCs but the 1 trillion dollars of the US national debt china holds.
> You don’t ship fentanyl and other synthetic drugs to a country you are friends with.
You ship them to where people are buying them, unless you're saying it's a government operation and not a case of lax export regulations, which I'd be very surprised if it was the case, at least directly.
For one, because treason refers to an enemy, not an adversary, and China is not legally an enemy of the US (at war). You can't just assert that China is an enemy in court without some legal basis.
Note that not even the Rosenbergs were charged with treason for sharing US nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union. That's how high the bar for treason is.
They were used later against US forces but wasn't something the US necessarily expected.
There's an argument for it, which is sufficient to leave alone unless you want to argue the merits (not quibble about a specific definition).
Case in point if slackers were found guilty in China (or any country of Asia) destroying millions of lives using prescription drugs he would have been shamed, his company would have been desolved and executed immediately instead of wasting years of time in court debating on the technicality of the issue in the name of giving proper justice.
The raft of trade deals, tourism, cultural exchange, investment and massive trade relationship would say otherwise.
> "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
> the Court explained that a person could be convicted of treason only if he or she adhered to an enemy and gave that enemy “aid and comfort.” As the Court explained: “A citizen intellectually or emotionally may favor the enemy and harbor sympathies or convictions disloyal to this country’s policy or interest, but, so long as he commits no act of aid and comfort to the enemy, there is no treason. On the other hand, a citizen may take actions which do aid and comfort the enemy—making a speech critical of the government or opposing its measures, profiteering, striking in defense plants or essential work, and the hundred other things which impair our cohesion and diminish our strength—but if there is no adherence to the enemy in this, if there is no intent to betray, there is no treason.”
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/art...
I'd say the terms under which many investments in PRC were made fall under the first standard.
By saying you think aiding the enemies of the United States alone is sufficient you are disagreeing with the Supreme Court. If simply aiding the enemies of the United States is sufficient for a treason conviction then would everyone who goes on strike at a factory that makes something important to the US military (steel lets say) be committing treason? The Supreme Court and myself say its only treason if the strike was done out of adherence to a foreign power and not if done for other reasons (like better working conditions).
I think the Supreme Court's interpretation is much more practical and less prone to abuse then yours. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/art...
I say this agreeing that these investors really hallowed out America. My father was in one of those factories and I remember him specifically training his Chinese replacement (who they flew over for 6 months).
It devastated my family. That said, I don’t think treason is the correct term.
There are CCP-controlled/tolerated commercial ventures that participate in the market economy. If you're investing in China, you can be sure there's a Party boss who's getting to wet his beak and dictate terms on which the deal will be accepted. Investments in China are not handled for the benefit of private interests; they are handled for the benefit of a strategic goal of the state.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Put your own desires over those of the people in your own country to a large enough extent and it sure starts to feel like something treasonous.
Consumers also like buying cheap products.
If you look at the history of the DJIA, it wasn't really until the 1980s that it began to consistently take off (https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historic...). That money previously went to a wider variety of outlets into American society, like taxes paid to the government or wages paid to workers. When Milton Friedman argued that companies exist solely to return value to shareholders, shareholders fought successfully to see the value diverted away from those outlets and towards them. If your consumers are workers who no longer see rising wages, and you want them to buy your stuff, you have to find cheaper ways to sell things, so the argument was made that the PRC would politically liberalize if the world made its products there. The alternative was to not have all of the money go back to shareholders, and that was, of course, unacceptable.
They also chart growth that exists purely in theory.
Not really, unless you think the economy and resultant stock market is purely theoretical with no bearing on reality, in which case, there would be nothing left for me to tell you with such diametrically opposing belief systems.
Consumers also like having jobs and money to buy products of any type ... presumably.
History is always easy to predict in hindsight.
Even after Tiananmen Square in 1989, things could have turned around. Imagine what would have happened if someone would have stood up to the regime and turned it into a democracy. We would now have been talking about how clever George H.W. Bush had been in lifting them out of poverty etc etc. Also, the Soviet Union was the biggest threat still on that point. It fell only in the early 1990s. So what was so bad about giving China some space as a counterweight to the Soviet Union? Their relations where pretty bad since the Sino-Soviet split on the 1960. Only in 1989 was there a first summit again between China and the Soviet Union.
> China's using its massive industrial base that Americans funded to increase its capabilities for a showdown with the US
Probably better to talk about "The West" since many Western nations have imported goods and services from China and will potentially end up in a conflict.
of course isn’t this a contention of most mainstream economists too?
China's going to be way too busy with internal affairs to try and start a showdown.
China is not anywhere near a global economic supremacy.
Nominally, China is close to half the size of the US.
The idea that China is so big it runs the whole world is laughable. It's not even close to being the biggest player - and even the US is not that important like it was after WW2.
Also, in case you haven't noticed, the US is struggling with some very spicy internal affairs right now too.
The US's saving grace is that China's foreign policy is absolute shit and they've made themselves hated by every single one of their neighbors in a way the US could only dream of.
The implications in this thread that US citizens are soon going to be running for their lives from foreign threats seem incredibly paranoid -- the sort of thing I'd expect to see in a ZeroHedge or InfoWars comment section, not on this forum.
Just imagine what is going to happen then to them and their families. Of course they don’t care that much to weight the risks
The (former) US wealthy elite don’t have the same strong ties with the US as they did in the past. They see themselves as international citizens free to go where it benefits them most.
They'd flee the country because they have the wealth to do so.
VC is a broad term.
Most of the time the Chinese and Indian operations of VC funds are separated from the American fund, and have a different set of partners and a different pot of money.
It was because of this that international funds like Sequoia divested their American fund from their Chinese and Indian funds.
This was a reason behind why YC ended up shutting down YC India and YC China around 2018-19 (but also because they couldn't compete with Sequoia India-now-Peak XV Surge or Antler in Asia)
Accel and Sequoia did/do this.
Seqouia's got tricky because their US fund is heavily invested in US Sustainability tech, and they were overinvested in China leading to reputational issues for their US fund
They go to the partners managing the individual fund.
A VC Fund is basically like a bottle of wine.
Each fund raises a vintage, and any profit (or loss) from that vintage is kept within the vintage itself.
VCs make money from their operating funds - they charge investors around 1.5-3% (depending on fund size) in Annual Management Fees.
That money goes to the staff of the Fund who are operating the vintage to pay for salaries, office space, business expenses, etc.
Most VCs end up making way less money than if they remained a PM or Engineer, but the work is intellectually rewarding and upsides/fame can be massive.
Perhaps a better way to phrase it is that each firm is like a real estate patent corporation and each fund is its own separate but owned corporation, the way commercial real estate companies incorporate every building.
If one VC fund lost money, only the LPs would suffer, the firms other funds would still operate independently.
Great point! Wasn't sure if most readers on HN know that fact though.
Though,
> Bottles of wine are not separately incorporated
is starting to happen in a way.
Lots of Wines are just a brandname now with different vintages just being sourced from different growers and fermenters directly, so a no-name Winery could rent out an established brand and it's associated cache
https://www.sequoiafund.com/performance/
Do the numbers here include that 1.5-3% or should it be subtracted out? It looks like they have severely underperformed the SP500 for the last 3, 5, 10 years.
> It looks like they have severely underperformed the SP500 for the last 3, 5, 10 years.
Yep! That was why Sequoia Fund (the US operation and brand owner) had India+SEA and China funds created in the 2010s and why they began restructuring in 2020-23 [0]
[0] - https://www.axios.com/2021/10/26/sequoia-capital-fund-ventur...
Edit to add that this also goes for plenty of companies: See Microsoft with their AI center in Beijing despite being a major provider of services to the U.S. government.
https://thedispatch.com/article/microsoft-issues-warning-abo...
Congress delegated some parts of rulemaking authority to them. It can do that. It has done that. Congress can always undelegate it, if it thinks that the agencies are doing a poor job. Or it can pass laws that modify their mandates.
Given that it doesn't do much of that, it seems to be pretty happy with the job they are doing. (You know who isn't happy? A bunch of unelected, unaccountable, partisan life-time appointees, who seem to be have a habit of legislating from the bench, ruling on hypothetical cases, or on straight-up fabricated facts...)
If you don't like a legislature that doesn't do anything, consider electing a legislature that actually wants to legislate (the current Congress ain't it.)
https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/media/letters/lett...
But non small parts of American VC do either not seem to have much of a ethical bottom line outside of when it might cause costly PR disasters, or put themself on a moralistic pedestal convincing themself they know better whats right (often with some very twisted version of the American dream where money makes might and might makes right), or don't look too closely into this kind aspects of companies because the "don't want to know" as if they knew they had to act different.
BTW, I don’t even think that this is one of those cases. I personally don’t pin the issue discussed in OP on YC in any way.
edit: the same document that defines "aid and comfort to the enemy" as treason has a specific procedure for declaring war which hasn't happened.
North America and the Pacific does.
The EU is still indifferent as they feel Russia is the larger threat.
And it makes sense. Living in the West Coast, China is much closer than where the fighting would happen in Eastern Europe.
For most of Europe, it's the other way around.
Trade being cut off with Russia is more of a threat to Europeans than their military.
This is the same mentality most average Europeans have about US-China if you chat with them.
From a policymaking standpoint, both are equally worrisome to the status quo, but public perception is entirely different.
The 2022 invasion of Ukraine basically slammed the door on Western investment/business in Russia. Sure, some companies have yet to divest, but the obvious ways to make money (and thus influence Russia through market forces) are now mostly gone.
Russia has since become more and more of a vassal state of China and India. The country's vast natural resource wealth must be sold somewhere, and a large part of the market will not buy at any price. Europeans and North Americans were fairly lenient on just what they wanted of Russia in order to buy their output. Basically, don't launch an invasion of Ukraine. Since Putin couldn't hop over that bar, he now gets to hop over the bar set by China and India, which means selling things at a bargain-basement price purely on the customer's terms. If China doesn't like something the Russians are doing, they get to say "it'd be a real shame if Rosneft couldn't sell that oil and natural gas this quarter".
yet. (?) Seems to be a ton of money being spent to 'defend Taiwan' https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202312230004
Saying that our goal is to need to keep the average citizen of China much, much poorer than us is basically saying you want a conflict.
Everything is 'investing in strategic initiatives designed to have China overtake the world' if you squint hard enough.
People are too easily swayed by 'current thing'. Russia's invasion is in the context of centuries of declining conflict globally - and even in Europe an unprecedented level of peace for the past 70 years.
I'm not sure how a singular war somehow disproves centuries of declining conflict levels and overall still the most peaceful period in modern memory post-1960s.
and there's "We made a fast buck off war profiteering by investing directly in both (or one) side's military pipelines"
I think we'd like to avoid the latter, while preserving the former. I think VC is a good example of the latter.
> The lawmakers found that these firms invested at least $3 billion in, and provided expertise and other benefits to, People's Republic of China (PRC) critical technology companies, including many aiding the Chinese military, surveillance state, or the CCP's genocide in Xinjiang.
That's quite different than solar panels, healtcare tech, or electric cars, which might spur beneficial trade relationships. PRC is not going to export the sponsored kinds of tech to USA, which does nothing for trade. It's profit-motive.
I don't think China should ban people from investing in Amazon because it helps the US military.
China's investment into the US is much larger than the US's investment into China.
the "The Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party" is actually "United States House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party" so its a bit misleading to assume they dont have a vested interest in slamming companies that invest in Chinese firms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Com...
The organization is basically a last-ditch bipartisan effort to put the tiger back in the cage and was formed after most of the octogenarians in congress were made aware that China was somewhere less than a decade away from eclipsing US GDP. Whatever your views on the CCP are, these guys are largely in it to maintain US hegemony by slandering trade in the hopes it inspires investors or CEO's to reconsider a country that not only beat the US to 5G technology, but built its own space station in four years time and its own competitive sub 10nm chipset to comply with US bans on imports. https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/22/china_smic_7nm_chips/
If you honestly wanted to play this nationalist game, it arguably should have started about 30 years ago. no 'beacon on the hill' burns forever, but the capital class certainly did their best to douse the light along the way through profiteering and unchecked globalization.
The issue is the fact that Chinese companies have dramatically better access to the US market than American firms have access to the Chinese market. This is a regulatory and trade failure of extreme incompetence that has never been properly addressed by Congress or the President.
If Facebook, X, Pinterest, Reddit, et al. can't exist freely in China, then TikTok doesn't get access to the US (until ByteDance becomes a minority shareholder etc).
TikTok follows US law. The companies you mentioned exited China because they didn't want to build out their own part of the Great Firewall. The irony in this criticism is that the US companies were mostly responding to domestic political pressure not to abet Chinese censorship. So it was more like export controls that caused the exodus of US companies rather than import controls.
In the old broadcast media days, US kept a pretty close eye on foreign media networks and they never had a foothold the way American media companies had. Think RT
Meanwhile, VOA operated (still does) around the globe spreading freedom and liberty. (Not sarcasm, really...)
Today, we have foreign media operators serving content to the American population, including minors, unfettered.
Look at the disasters of the 20th century for evidence of the power of ideas. A group of people united by an idea is a force to reckon with, and we're allowing foreign agents to control the flow of ideas on a broad scale. (I'm not against free speech, quite the opposite, I'm just pointing out the obvious).
These questions aren't simple to answer, nor are the proposed solutions going to make people happy, but you've rightly identified they're of pressing national concern.
One thing is for certain: we're in for the time of our lives.
Even if you assume there's some magic subliminial Sinocentric messaging in the app, by the time the TikTok audience is old enough to be in positions of power, its influence will be long gone-- a stock photo screenshot on a nostalgia slideshow next to "remember the Xbox 360?" or "That white second-generation Prius that there was one of in every neighbourhood." This will all blow over in another few years. The kids will move on to VipVorp and Slipppper, parents' groups will while about the scourge of four-dimensional VR hyper-porn, and the world will keep spinning.
If the rise of China is an actual existential threat (spoiler: it's not-- there's a difference between "we can't act with complete impunity on the global stage anymore" and "suddenly we have the per-capita GDP of Haiti") then it's going to take more than economic roadblocks and scare tactics. America has to make itself more competitive-- better education, better infrastructure, more strategic use of subsidy and planning tools, more money in R&D and less on stock buybacks.
You basically can't operate in China without somehow letting the CCP in on your affairs. A great example is the automotive industry: American car companies had to work with Chinese-based counterparts in joint ventures to have any operations in China prior to 2017. Microsoft had to let Chinese officials look over the Windows source code to get it approved for sale in PRC. Hollywood routinely modifies movie productions to appeal to Chinese censors and audiences, even at points in the production where the changes would impact the release outside of China (see the remake of Red Dawn). American companies do this because they fear losing access to the market; Chinese companies do not have to do the same for access to the American market.
House should spend a bit more time on its own conscious And its own deeds.
¹ Personally I am not in favor of the term genocide in these instances but since the House used it, it applies to the other event as well.
Through only some, but definitely too many.
And this argument is just whataboutism - sure we can do better everywhere but that doesn't mean the Chinese government gets a pass
and no one claimed that