The previous administration really shined a light on the opposition happening between the United States and China. However, this opposition has been ongoing.
China has been experiencing rapid growth over the past two decades due to American (and European) investments there. These investments are coming from many Americans investing in the stock market without knowledge of the company they are actually supporting. In fact, the Securities and Exchange Commission is demanding that over 250 Chinese Companies being traded on the NYSE and Nasdaq better inform investors about political and regulatory risks.
SEC Chair Gary Gensler said recently in Bloomberg, that the enhanced disclosure requirements should be included in China-listed companies’ annual reports in early 2022. The new details “would likely include” information about shell-company structures, known as Variable Interest Entities (VIE).
For years China has been exempt from publishing third-party audits of their financials by citing state secrets. However, Gensler has stated that “If the Chinese companies do not open up their books in the next three years, whether Cayman-based or China-based, they won’t be listed.”
How did this all begin?
China developed a new strategy that began quietly without notice. Until the world watched as Australia became ostracized from China due to asking the World Health Organization to look into the origins of COVID-19.
Cai Xia, who served for 15 years as a professor in the highest temple of Chinese communist ideology, who now lives in exile in the United States, “China’s new grand strategy aimed first to dilute U.S. influence in Asia, then to displace American power more overtly from the region, and ultimately to dominate a global order more suited to Beijing’s governance model. That model isn’t merely authoritarian; it’s “neo-totalitarian,”
After the Cold War, the U.S. policymakers were sure that CCP would find it nearly impossible to resist the tide of liberalization set off by the collapse of the Berlin Wall. According to this line of thought, by helping enrich China, the United States would loosen the party’s grip on its economy, people, and politics, setting the conditions for a gradual convergence with the pluralistic West. (As stated by Matthew Pottinger in a recent article).
This assumption was only furthered by the CCP’s new strategy. Wester technologies, which all assumed, would help to further democracy in China, were only used by Bejing to surveil and control its people and to target the world’s population outside China’s borders. According to Matthew Pottinger, “The party now systematically cultivates Western corporations and investors that, in turn, pay deference to Chinese policies and even lobby their home capitals in ways that align with the CCP’s objectives.”
The CCP blocks U.S. social platforms in order to regulate what its citizens see. While America has let the popular platform TikTok continue to run free. Creating a forum for the CCP to influence the story presented about China and the life lived there.
According to the Coalition for a Prosperous America, “The CCP has a seat on the three-person board of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance. TikTok can easily be used by China to bombard American youth with messaging on topics ranging from the pandemic to politics. It should be banned in the United States, just as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are banned in China.”
Co-Founder of Made In America, Brad Winnings commented that “It is time for America to take the same stand against the CCP’s social platforms as the CCP has taken with the U.S.’s.”
Matthew Pottinger states, “If U.S. policymakers and legislators find the will, however, there is a way to pull Wall Street and Silicon Valley back onside, convert the United States’ vulnerabilities into strengths, and mitigate the harmful effects of Beijing’s political warfare. That must begin with bolder steps to stem the flow of U.S. capital into China’s so-called military-civil fusion enterprises and to frustrate Beijing’s aspiration for leadership in, and even monopoly control of, high-tech industries—starting with semiconductor manufacturing. The United States must also do more to expose and confront Beijing’s information warfare, which spews disinformation and sows division by exploiting U.S. social media platforms—platforms that are themselves banned inside China’s own borders. And Washington should return the favor by making it easier for the Chinese people to access authentic news from outside China’s so-called Great Firewall.”
To read more Made In America articles about Chinese Investments, click here.
Twenty years of corporate investment in China under the guise of “helping democracy come to China” has only made a communist government stronger. You can thank our politicians for allowing this to happen and also for continuing to let it happen. And please don’t confuse the Chinese people with the Chinese government. They are just as much pawns of power hungry people in their country as we are in ours.