RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the tariff war launched by US President Donald Trump against China, much is said about the Americans’ strategy, mistakes and “brutality”. Less is said about China. Here are three truths about China’s relationship with the West that help to better nuance a simplistic thinking that many so readily embrace.

1. China’s homicides have poisoned the world

During the COVID -19; crisis, vaccines heated up tempers to such an extent that many people lost sight of the fact that vaccines were merely an answer to the original problem: the virus. Whether it escaped from a laboratory or came from a “wet market“, COVID is in all instances a legacy of the Chinese communist regime to the world.

Since then, China has been cracking down on any attempt to identify the source of the virus, just as, for years, it has been doing its utmost to cover up the situation. The original error seems to have been negligence, however that was quickly followed by deliberate lies as to the human-to-human transmissibility of the virus. While China shut down its own internal systems of transportation, it intentionally, backed by the World Health Organization (WHO), saw millions of its citizens travel to locations abroad. Those who restricted admitting them were accused of “racism.”

The WHO had been warned of the danger of transmissibility by Taiwan but chose to disregard it, evidently for “political reasons”: China does not recognize Taiwan. The damage was of historic proportions. China’s cover-up about the human-to-human transmissibility of the virus was criminal. In the United States, more than 1.2 million people died from COVID in Europe, approximately 2 million, and in the world, approximately 7 million.

According to the World Bank and IMF, in 2020, the global economy plunged into its worst recession since World War II. Instead of expected growth of 3.3%, global GDP contracted by 5%, a deviation of 8%. In monetary terms, this contraction corresponds to a loss of several trillions of dollars. The IMF estimates the cumulative loss over 2020 and 2021 at $9 trillion; more than the combined GDP of Japan and Germany. Support measures (short-time work, support to companies) increased public debt. Although figures vary, economic losses due to the COVID crisis range between $10 trillion and $20, trillion. These Dantesque losses would have been avoided, or at least mitigated, if China had not locked itself into its own degeneracy.

This global catastrophe was followed by China’s sending the poison fentanyl – and, after 2019, “just” its precursor ingredients — to the US, along with other lethal opioids. The smallest amount of fentanyl, equivalent to “a few grains of salt,” can cause death. During the last five years, more than 250,000 Americans have been killed by fentanyl overdoses.

2. China plunders the West

Estimates of intellectual property theft attributed to China vary by source and research method. A 2017 report by the bipartisan US Commission on Intellectual Property Theft estimated that losses to the US economy from counterfeit products, software piracy and theft of trade secrets by China range from $225 billion to $600 billion a year. The Cyber Brief suggests that the loss to the US could be as high as $5.6 trillion annually “when accounting for undetected and unreported cases of espionage.”

The European Commission has acknowledged that Chinese violations of intellectual property rights, such as theft of trade secrets and forced technology transfers, are causing “irreparable damage” to European companies. Sectors in which intellectual property plays a major role (such as pharmaceuticals, cars and technology) account for almost one-third of jobs in the European Union and 80% of exports, making these losses significant. According to one estimate, intellectual property theft costs the European economy between €50 billion and €150 billion a year, including counterfeit products, lost sales and impact on innovation and employment.

The pattern is familiar: a Western company invests years in research and development, launches an innovative product, and a short while later an almost identical copy turns up, from China, at a much lower price. No development costs, no middlemen, just direct access to the same market, with subsidized pricing to put the original company out of business. How can the inventor ever win like that?

Structural theft is and will remain at the heart of China’s model. Combined with “free trade'” — free in name, not in practice — this provides China with an unfair and almost unbridgeable advantage in its global power-building.

China also seems to have an impressive tradition of failing to honor any commitment to which it agrees, whether to the World Trade Organization, or pledging not to militarize its artificial islands in the South China Sea, which were militarized within months, or refusing to abide by standard accounting practices. Some might consider such behavior problematic.

3. There is no Chinese state or company: only Mao’s Party

(a) China is a closed market. China maintains a negative list for foreign investment and restricts or bans access to certain strategic sectors such as telecommunications, energy, media and finance. Even open sectors require specific licenses, which are often difficult to obtain. In virtually all sectors, Western companies have to enter into a local joint venture with Chinese “partners,” who hold a majority stake. This entails forced technology transfer and loss of operational control. The administrative processes for obtaining approvals or certifications are opaque, lengthy and subject to arbitrary interpretation, putting foreign companies at a disadvantage.

Moreover, Chinese state-owned and privately-owned companies benefit from subsidies, preferential loans and privileged access to public tenders, thus creating unfair competition for Western companies. Despite joining the WTO in 2001, China still has non-tariff barriers, such as specific technical standards and rigorous inspections, which make it difficult to import foreign products. In sectors such as steel and electric vehicles, Chinese overproduction, supported by government subsidies, floods the domestic market and marginalizes imported products. Finally, access to the internet is tightly controlled, limiting Western companies’ ability to operate in the digital sector without meeting strict requirements, such as local data storage. Technology companies must comply with cybersecurity regulations, including sharing sensitive data with authorities.

In summary, China exports massively to the West and does everything it can to impede imports: a total success for 30 years. Until Trump, the Western market was wide open to China, while China closed itself off to Western companies by every means.

(b) The party is everything. The myth that China would democratize through trade was built on the idea that Chinese companies are separate from the regime. This does not happen to be so: in China, the Communist Party is everything. There is no state in the Western sense of the word, no body separate from political power. There is only the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). No Chinese company, or CEO or even medical doctor, operates without its consent.

That CCP is, fundamentally, still the party of Chairman Mao Zedong. Policies such as the “Great Leap Forward” (1958-1962) and the “Cultural Revolution” (1966-1976) made Mao perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, certainly in absolute numbers. Estimates vary, but historians broadly agree on a death toll of between 30 and 70 million, mostly due to famines, political purges and executions (Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, 2010); Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, 2005). The Great Leap Forward alone led to one of the deadliest famines ever, with an estimated 15 to 45 million victims (Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, 2008).

It is often said that the CCP of today has nothing to do with the CCP of the past. But that is nonsense. We are talking about pretty much one and the same party, which claims to follow pretty much one and the same ideology. Certainly on social media, and increasingly out in the open in recent years, it also appears to be re-identifying with the figure of Mao.

What would we say if the Nazi Party were still in power in Berlin? What if in 2025, it were to present itself as more open and tolerant than in 1933 or 1943, but still appealed to the same type of leader and the same ideology?

China’s global project is overtly hegemonic. Everything Chinese “companies” gain and steal from the West ultimately flows into the communist regime and funds its ambition to become the dominant world power, starting with the military. President Xi Jinping’s regime unleashed a pandemic over the world, lied about it, exacerbated the situation and categorically rejected any responsibility.

If we continue to allow ourselves to be drained by a regime that never plays by the rules, the United States will end up where Europe already finds itself: with massive deindustrialization, strategic dependency and weakness in times of crisis. Trump appears, at least for now, committed to turning that future around.

So let us criticize the orange man: his methods, his sometimes untoward comments, his impulsive shifts. But let us not lose sight that when it comes to the bottom line, in reining in a lawless predatory Chinese market and reindustrializing America, he is right. No one else even tried.

Drieu Godefridi is a jurist (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain), philosopher (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain) and PhD in legal theory (Paris IV-Sorbonne). He is an entrepreneur, CEO of a European private education group and director of PAN Medias Group. He is the author of The Green Reich (2020).