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Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr said American businesses and universities have been “feeding the machine” when it comes to assisting China in its attempts to dominate the U.S. in technology and economics.
Barr said China has mastered a “highly orchestrated game” of persuading U.S. businesses to invest or surrender technology on the promise of large profit returns or economic benefits that never materialize.
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Chinese adversaries then look to foreclose the businesses to their markets by stripping U.S. businesses of their intellectual property to jumpstart their own companies, Barr said, leaving them as “husks.”
“So, we’ve been sort of feeding the machine in helping their economic growth and advances in technology,” Barr said.
However, Barr said businesses are “waking up” to China’s actions as the U.S. works to build back the economy weakened by COVID-19.
“COVID brought about a sort of epiphany, where people understand that we have to bring back home a lot of our supply chain,” Barr said. “And then, work with our companies to compete effectively with the Chinese and counteract a lot of their tactics.”
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The former attorney general was joined by Jude Blanchette, Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Matt Pottinger, former U.S. Deputy national security adviser, at the Richard Nixon Foundation’s Grand Strategy Summit in Washington, D.C., on Friday.
Barr, who served as the 77th and 85th attorney general under former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump, said over his 28 years in office, what surprised him most was the intensity of Chinese intelligence gathered in the United States, particularly in universities.
Graduate students will be inserted into institutions’ key research programs, and will then steal information and send it back to China, according to Barr. Key scientists will also receive funds from the U.S. government on the promise that they will not share their research outside of the U.S. and disclose their relationships with foreign countries. However, Barr said, that is not always the case.
“We have situations where many of them have done that — they’ve signed agreements with China and participated in the so-called ‘talents programs,’ which pays the professors substantial sums to get involved with sharing research with China and setting up competing entities.”
The summit comes as President Joe Biden is set to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday, the first in-person bilateral meeting since Biden took office.
All panelists said they did not expect much to come out of Biden’s meeting with Xi. However, Blanchette said overall, all states, not just the U.S., need to come together to take action against China’s aggressive methods to achieve economic power.
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He said the key question is not how the U.S. extracts itself from China, but “how do we do it smartly, and at what cost?”
“There is always the unspoken thing, like every action you have has a cost associated with it,” he said. “China is a globally integrated economy. We need to set clear rules — companies cannot self-police, we’ve seen that … We need a clearer picture of what trade-offs and costs we are willing to accept to extricate ourselves from China.”
