Donald Trump Was Right
My teenage years took place during the “End of History.” This period in time refers to an essay published by Francis Fukuyama, a political science professor at John’s Hopkins. The piece came out just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama argued that free trade and liberal democracy would make for a permanently peaceful world.
Fukuyama wasn’t alone. There was a widespread assumption that countries from the former communist block would embrace economic and political liberalism and would be integrated into the American-led international order. There was an expectation that countries that traded with each other wouldn’t fight with each other. In 1996, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman offered a pithy observation: “No two countries with a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other.”
The optimism was bipartisan, especially as it related to China. The conventional wisdom was that bringing a poor China into the World Trade Organization would help loosen the authoritarian grip of the Chinese Communist Party. Many thought that granting open access to our economy would lead to economic freedom and that economic freedom would lead to political freedom. Like most everyone else, I was hopeful about China. I credit Donald Trump for waking me up to the reality of the CCP and its bad behavior.
In 2018, the U.S. Trade Representative estimated that Chinese theft of American IP costs U.S. firms between $225 billion and $600 billion every year. According to a 2017 report by the U.S. Intellectual Property Commission, we lose between 0.87 and 2.61 percent of annual U.S. GDP to China. Addressing the issue of economic theft, the Trump-appointed director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, said that Chinese economic espionage has amounted to “one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.”
Looking back, we were naïve. We were so excited to have billions of Chinese consumers that we ignored a key fact: the Chinese Communist Party required American companies to partner with Chinese companies and, crucially, forced American companies to share intellectual property. For decades, the CCP played the system against us. They didn’t just extract important technologies from us. They built strong domestic producers by using government subsidies and by erecting trade barriers.
The CCP has also taken advantage of our university system. Through the Thousand Talents Program, China has paid scientists at American universities to bring knowledge and innovation back to China. There are Confucius Institutes, which have given $113 million to U.S. universities from January 2012 to June 2018. In total, according to the Congressional Research Service, the Chinese government has spent more than $158 million on schools in the U.S. since 2006. These donations have allowed the CCP to influence university activity and have threatened academic freedom. There are also Chinese Students and Scholars Associations on American campuses. These organizations have alerted Chinese consulates and embassies when Chinese students stray from the party line. When a Chinese student at the University of Maryland praised the “fresh air of free speech” in America, the CCP harassed her family back home. Xi Jinping’s has even targeted American citizens and green card holders.
It isn’t just a problem that China has been stealing IP and punishing people living in America. The lure of the Chinese marketplace is changing America. There are examples of Marriott and Delta. There are examples of movie studios self-censoring in order to appease the CCP. Hollywood’s kowtow to China is ironic to say the least. Hollywood actors, producers, and directors love to lecture Americans about social justice, but the same people bend over backwards to please a county that has placed millions of Uyghur Muslims in prison reeducation camps and has complete contempt for homosexuality.
Then there is the NBA. During the racial justice protests of 2020, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver encouraged basketball players that they “not stick to sports.” NBA players added Black Lives Matter to their shoes and changed names on their jerseys. But there was a far different reaction when the Houston Rocket’s Darrell Torrey tweeted “fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” Lebron James, who had been very vocal about domestic politics, voiced qualms about Torrey’s comments. Or consider the example of Enes Kanter Freedom. Kanter grew up in Turkey but fell in love with America and our First Amendment when he came here to play basketball (Kanter changed his last name to Freedom). “When the topic was Turkey, the National Basketball Association was very supportive,” he explained to a congressional committee. But things changed when he spoke up about China’s human rights record. While Adam Silver denies that the league “blackballed Enes” after he painted “Free Uyghurs” on his shoes, the timing seems quite convenient that his basketball career ended just after he started to criticize China.
The optimism in the 1990s wasn’t just misplaced in term of economic and political liberalism. Many were wrong about the promise of the internet. On March 8, 2000, U.S. President Bill Clinton dismissed China’s efforts to restrain online speech. “Good luck,” quipped Clinton. “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.” But now China’s surveillance state includes “Great Firewall of China” and the “social credit score.” There is also China’s export of TikTok. Center for Humane Technology founder Tristan Harris observes that China “ships the opium version to the rest of the world” while it feeds their domestic population the “Tik Tok version of spinach.”
The Chinese version is called Douyin. This app is designed to protect children. Users under fourteen are required to use it on “teenage mode,” and young users are limited to 40 minutes a day between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Users of Douyin are treated to a curated stream of videos promoting patriotism and social cohesion. As Nicolas Chaillan, a former Space Force Chief Software Officer, explained to the New York Post, “The algorithm is different. It promotes science, educational and historical content.” Tik Tok is especially problematic because so many young Americans get their news from this app and the algorithm is a mystery. We can’t be sure that nefarious actors aren’t influencing what Americans on Tik Tok are learning about the world. Finally, is it scary to think that, when asked to choose between suspending their TikTok use for one year or giving up their right to vote for a year, 64 percent of teens said they would give up their voting rights.
I’ll end this Substack letter with a look at Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column from September 8, 2009. He praised the Chinese dictatorship, writing that “one-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.” A year later, Friedman mused optimistically on Meet the Press about being “China just for a day” so we could “get things done” as it relates to the environment. Thankfully, the narrative has changed about China, a country that opens dozens and dozens of coal plants each year. The CCP is trying build a world more amendable to the dictatorship model that cracks down on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. I don’t like Donald Trump at all, but I do like that he changed the conversation on China.