China

In April 2022, six weeks after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, President Biden signed legislation to suspend Russia’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status. “Revoking PNTR from Russia,” he said, “is going to make it harder for Russia to do business with the United States… The free world is coming together to defeat Putin.” PNTR status, also known as Most Favored Nation (MFN) status, is a designation granted among World Trade Organization members. Receiving nations are awarded all trade advantages that any other nation receives. Revoking PNTR status from Russia was a strategic move. It opened the door to deliver comprehensive economic strikes against Moscow and sent a clear signal to markets.

There is a joke in Taipei that if China invades Taiwan the best place to shelter is in microchip factories, the only places the People’s Liberation Army can’t afford to destroy. The country that controls advanced chips controls the future of technology — and Taiwan’s chip fabrication foundries (“fabs”) are the finest in the world. Successful reunification between the mainland and its renegade province would give China a virtual monopoly over the most advanced fabs. Given that Xi Jinping has made clear his intention to take control of Taiwan by 2032, it is no wonder that the American government is worried about the concentration of cutting-edge semiconductor technology on the island.

In becoming the highest-ranking American politician to visit Taiwan in a quarter-century, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has become the dominant foreign affairs news story of the month, eclipsing, if briefly, Russia’s war in Ukraine. Yet beyond all the sound and fury, Pelosi’s trip changed nothing in the cross-Strait balance of power. What it did was to legitimize the “mission creep” bringing Taiwan and America closer together. Both supporters and critics of the trip were quick to invest Pelosi’s visit with major symbolic significance.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi has always had a flair for the dramatic. During the Trump presidency, for example, she ostentatiously tore up his State of the Union speech. But for sheer spectacle, it will be hard for Pelosi to top her “will she, won’t she” visit to Taiwan this week. In spite of the suspense, there was never really any doubt about it. For weeks China has issued dire warnings about the perils of her visit. So, as it happens, have several commentators, including The Spectator’s Freddy Gray, whom I debated on the Americano podcast, and who seems to have a bad case of the collywobbles about the Pelosi trip.

The Biden administration is increasingly concerned about a trip to Taiwan next month by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And they should be. The visit is pointlessly provocative for little gain. Pelosi would do well to remember the Chinese proverb: "Always know if the juice is worth the squeeze." The domestic political juice is charm points for Pelosi from her large, pro-Taiwan constituency back home as she runs for reelection. A third of Pelosi’s congressional district is Asian-American and taking on Big China has long been a major part of her political identity. She, for example, made a public show out of meeting with pro-democracy protesters from Hong Kong and urging a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

“Fighting corruption is not just good governance,” Joe Biden once said. “It is self-defense. It is patriotism, and it’s essential to the preservation of our democracy and our future.” Going into the first term of his presidency, President Obama gave then-Vice President Biden one of the most important foreign policy portfolios: managing the US relationship with China. However, there is precious little to show for this prodigious assignment.

Cockburn is not one to point fingers (as they are often preoccupied with his cigar), but he finds himself making an exception for President Biden over his apparent U-turn on the issue of the United States using military force to help defend Taiwan against China. Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University, just unearthed a 2001 Washington Post op-ed then-senator Joe Biden wrote dissenting from President George W. Bush’s stance that the “United States had an obligation to defend Taiwan if it was attacked by China.” Biden wrote that “words matter,” and that Bush’s extreme language had "damaged US credibility with our allies and sown confusion throughout the Pacific Rim.” Speaking of confusion...

No one now denies that Hong Kong is a fiefdom of Beijing. Its democratic leaders have been packed off to prison on spurious grounds or have left the territory, and its street protests have long been beaten to pieces with batons. The 2020 national security law has made mockery of Hong Kong's last shreds of freedom of expression, rendering all criticism of the Chinese Communist Party akin to terrorism; and its uncensored homegrown newspapers are now closed by the state — their proprietors inexorably marched off to jail. Any pretense of adherence to the treaties signed by Britain and China around the time of the handover in 1997 — treaties that guaranteed Hong Kong autonomy — has long fallen away. Hong Kong is a subject province of the People's Republic now, and nothing more.

If Asia has entered the debate over the war in Ukraine, it is primarily through questions over the role China is purported to be playing in supporting Russia. Given the now-infamous declaration of a “partnership without limits” by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping during the Beijing Olympics just weeks before the invasion, many observers have searched for signs of Chinese aid, military or economic, to Russia in the conflict. The scope of devastation in Ukraine and the probable war crimes being committed by Russian troops understandably mean less attention has been paid to how the conflict might affect geopolitical stability in the Indo-Pacific region. The exception is Taiwan — there has been considerable speculation over the influence of Ukraine on Beijing’s calculations there.

Several years ago, I visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It’s located, a bit surreally, in the former United States Information Agency building. Formerly called the "Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes," it showcases various captured US military equipment. What was particularly jarring to me was learning of the millions of Vietnamese civilians killed during the Vietnam War era. Of course, there’s a bit of irony here: a building formerly dedicated to projecting American public diplomacy and messaging in Southeast Asia now serves the different propaganda purpose of seeking to portray America as a violent aggressor guilty of war crimes.

It sure looks like basketball player Enes Kanter Freedom has been blackballed by the NBA for his candor over the league's cozy relationship with China — concentration camps filled with ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang and all. Freedom, who earlier this year began wearing human rights messages on his game shoes illustrated by Chinese dissident artist Badiucao, became a vocal critic of the NBA's cherrypicking of human rights issues. That included directly targeting the league’s star and arguably most recognizable athlete on the planet, LeBron James. In 2019, after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey spoke out against China and in support of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong in a series of now-deleted tweets, China suspended all NBA broadcasts within its borders.

China is tacitly backing Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. The Biden administration should combat this by imposing economic costs on China through the corporate Environmental, Social and Governance disclosure requirements that are already in place. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met in February at the Beijing Olympics, their thirty-eighth visit in the nine years since Xi took power. In a 5,000-word statement on February 4, Xi and Putin proclaimed their friendship with “no limits” and “no forbidden areas of cooperation.” Just weeks before the invasion, China signed agreements to buy from Russia energy and agricultural products worth over $200 billion.

I have a medal for winning the Cold War. And I'm not alone — they were awarded to all members of the military and federal civilian employees who served during the Cold War. That included me, at the tail end, with the State Department. Ironically, my so-called Cold War service was in Taiwan. I probably should return the thing; the Cold War is far from over. Part of the Cold War's real conclusion is playing out in Ukraine in real time. Is Taiwan, another hanging chad from that era, next? Is President Xi watching a weakened America giving in to the Russians and seeing his chance to seize Taiwan? Nope. Taiwan is not Ukraine is not Taiwan. The two places only exist next to each other in articles like this one because both are the results of American policy.

My sophomore year of college, I studied abroad in Ireland. I had pretty high expectations: my mother’s side of the family is almost entirely of Irish descent, and I suppose in some inchoate way I yearned to “go home,” as it were, even though the last of my Irish ancestors had arrived on American soil more than 150 years ago. Still, the Emerald Isle seemed to call to me (admittedly I was listening to a lot of The Chieftains). Boy, was I disappointed. It wasn’t that the Irish aren’t welcoming (they are), or that the adult beverages weren't delicious (they are). It was that Ireland was definitely not my home — not culturally, culinarily, or familialy.

From last fall, in an extension of a personality cult not seen since Mao Zedong, “Xi Jinping Thought” is being incorporated into China’s national curriculum. School textbooks are emblazoned with Xi’s smiling face, together with heartwarming slogans telling readers as young as six that their leader is watching over them. “Grandpa Xi Jinping is very busy with work, but no matter how busy he is, he still joins in our activities and cares about our growth,” reads one. “Xi Jinping Thought” must be taught at all levels of education, from elementary school to graduate programs, and there is special emphasis on capturing the minds of the youngest children.

It’s hard to say what was most distressing about the opening days of the Beijing Winter Olympics. The lament of the athletes “injured” by the swabs inserted into their noses for Covid testing? French speed skater Gwendoline Daudet’s anguish under the bubble after she was eliminated from the mixed relay? The embarrassing spectacle of Uighur skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang lighting the snowflake-shaped Olympic cauldron under the gaze of Xi Jinping, an image that the spokespersons of the International Olympic Committee found “charming”? The fact that, unlike in Berlin in 1936 or Moscow in 1980, the matter of a boycott was scarcely mentioned, as “it was shown” that the topic would have a “negative impact” on the athletes’ morale?

Nancy Pelosi, stock-trader extraordinaire, doubles as an adviser to America’s Olympic athletes. And her wise, nuanced advice to them is simple: “Shut up.” It would be a very bad idea, she says, to voice any political criticism at the games of the Chinese Communist Party or its glorious rule. You may have missed her similar advice to LeBron James, as he kissed the backside of Beijing’s dictators. You may have missed her critique of the NBA, as it protected its highly-profitable franchise in China. They were as compliant as any US multinational operating in Germany in the 1930s, eager to retain their profitable operations.

"Congress has dropped language from a must-pass bill governing US defense policy that would have effectively prevented US scientists from participating in Chinese programs aimed at attracting foreign scientific talent,” reported Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in December. The journal cautions, however, that the provision may reappear in another bill. The AAAS is the most authoritative voice for American scientists. It has generally opposed any restrictions on relations between US academics and China, and favored the US government’s stepping back from investigating and prosecuting scientists for lying about their service to China.