Concluding its Fifth Plenum, the Chinese Communist Party made clear that it intends to double down on U.S. intellectual property theft. Beijing didn’t use such explicit words, of course, but that’s the key takeaway from this week’s announcement.
One commentator explained the situation in an article circulated in state media. The effort to dramatically bolster China’s independent technology base was necessary, he said, toward “building a modern socialist country in an all-round way, to seize the major opportunities of a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, to build a new development pattern and shape new development advantages, we need more innovative forces and give full play to scientific and technological innovation that has not been seen in a century.”
China’s motive here is to ensure its continued innovation in military, telecommunications, and scaled-up hardware export industries. If it fails to master that innovation curve, the regime knows that its inherent structural weakness, the destruction of capital inherent to its socialist command economy model, will override any potential for sustained economic growth. That will bury Xi Jinping’s master plan for eventual global supremacy. Whoever wins in Tuesday’s election will have to grapple with this reality over the next four years.
China says this effort will be a nationally independent one — that the Chinese Communist Party will advance their technology interests via their own sacrifices. But that’s a lie. The reality is that China is only pursuing this technology agenda because it has lost access to western technology assets. China has been outmaneuvered by Trump administration restrictions centered on preventing firms like Huawei from accessing U.S. chips and software. While the Trump administration, oddly, is now weakening some of those restrictions, Beijing recognizes that Washington has woken up to the basic reality. Namely, the reality that China has used access to high-value U.S. technology assets to advance its global and domestic agenda. Considering that this agenda is centered on the replacement of the U.S.-led liberal international order with a Beijing-led feudal mercantile order, and on the subjugation of China’s people, the United States has good reason to take its action.
But herein lies the operative question. If China is unable to use legitimate trade to access the high-tech hardware and software it needs to drive forward its ambitions, what will it do?
The answer is unambiguous. What it has always done before: conduct an unrepentant campaign to cajole, coerce, and steal its way into possessing that technology.
Wherever possible, China will offer market access in return for technology transfers (something the Communist Party’s western puppets, such as Tim Geithner and Ray Dalio, ignore). But where that isn’t possible, China will rely on its division-size formations of People’s Liberation Army cyberspies to steal U.S. intellectual property. People’s Liberation Army and Ministry of State Security intelligence officers will simultaneously infiltrate and bribe their way into physical access to the best American technology and military firms. As the leading nation for high-technology products and research, the U.S. will be at the forefront of this war on knowledge. To be clear, China will deny what it is doing, but what it will be doing will be abundant in quantity and highly detrimental in its impact on the U.S.
In turn, whoever wins on Tuesday must make clear to China that its escalated intellectual property theft will come with unprecedented consequences. This bears particular concern for Joe Biden, seeing as the Obama administration signed one of the most idiotic deals in history when, in late 2015, President Barack Obama and Xi pledged to stop engaging in cyber-espionage. Safe to say, that friendly accord was not worth the paper it was written on.
A serious deterrence-defeat strategy against the Chinese intellectual property dragon means establishing clear red lines. And when those red lines are inevitably broken, rapid action by the National Security Agency against Chinese mainframes being used for attacks, aggressive diplomatic expulsions up to the Ambassador level, and punitive economic action in other spheres of Chinese concern.
