To cut dependency on the Chinese economy, the United States needs to base its policies on “two pillars”: economic containment of communist China and rebuilding the industrial power in the United States, said Jonathan Ward, a China scholar and founder of the Atlas Organization.
American policy toward communist China was guided for decades by the general idea to have China rise with an expectation that as China grew richer, it would become a responsible stakeholder—but that assumption did not bear out, Mr. Ward said in an interview on Epoch TV’s “American Thought Leaders” program on June 26.
The rise of China was made possible through U.S. engagement, access to American markets and American capital, the invitation to participate in the global financial system, as well as through the transfer of American technology, Mr. Ward explained.
“The classic deal during the last couple of decades of the rise of China, especially in the early 2000s and 2010s, was a technology transfer for market access deal,” Mr. Ward said, “where very advanced technologies would wind up in the hands of Chinese state-owned or state-backed companies, and essentially allow [Chinese] massive technological advancement across the board that we did very little to control.”
The Chinese economy is heavily dependent on export and Chinese government investment, Mr. Ward said. There were attempts to create a consumer sector to shift to consumption-led growth, but it has not gone as expected, he said.
To sustain China’s economic growth, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “has identified about 10 strategic industries that are targeted for investment and also intellectual property theft,” Mr. Ward said, explaining that these two strategies can be leveraged to build state-owned or state-backed super companies that can compete on global markets and with domestic companies.
From the perspective of the CCP, the civilian and military economies are quite linked, Mr. Ward said, calling it a civil–military fusion. By bringing civilian industrial innovation into the military sector, the CCP can compete with the United States in terms of military modernization, key strategic industries, and emerging technologies, he added.
By Ella Kietlinska and Jan Jekielek
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