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This book interests me from several perspectives. I’ve followed Newt’s career since he became a Georgia Congressman when I lived in Atlanta in the early 1980’s. I have an affinity for history, politics, and economics that aligns with his.
As an industrial consultant, I understand America’s industrial decline and China’s part in it. I’ve worked for and consulted for American companies that were severely diminished by malicious and incidental actions from Chinese state-sponsored firms. The American public has not been made fully aware of these attacks on our companies and their employees. Newt seeks to make us aware:
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After decades of misunderstanding China and its ruling Communist Party, I’ve come to realize that China is a much more formidable competitor than our politicians, academics, and news media have realized. We had accepted a fantasy version of China. The truth is, the real modern China is a totalitarian communist dictatorship… the combination of a Leninist totalitarian system with a historic belief that China should naturally be the Middle Kingdom at the center of all things.
It is the ambitions of the leadership—not the characteristics of the people—that make a totalitarian communist-ruled China dangerous.
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He details how China’s government, military, and businesses work together to steal American technologies, while discouraging American-made imports into China, and requiring American companies that want to sell in China to produce in China and export a surplus to the United States:
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This approach destroyed the American solar power industry, greatly harmed our steel and aluminum manufacturers, and decimated key parts of our technology hardware industries. The Chinese Communist Party simply drove American companies out of business when American companies couldn’t match the impossibly low subsidized prices of their Chinese competitors.
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Then comes China’s theft of our companies’ intellectual property:
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According to the US IP Commission’s 2017 report on China’s practices: “The annual cost to the U.S. economy continues to exceed $225 billion in counterfeit goods, pirated software, and theft of trade secrets and could be as high as $600 billion.
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He points out that China’s goal is to master emerging technologies of communications, weapon systems, and quantum computing in order to:
1. Place its people under an “E-Tyranny” regime of surveillance in their offices, homes, and on the streets, such that every movement, financial exchange, and word spoken in China will be surveilled. “Threats to the state” will be incarcerated, just like in Mao’s, Stalin’s, and Hitler’s regimes. Newt says that over a million Chinese are already incarcerated in brainwashing and labor camps.
2. Inflict a technological “Pearl Harbor” on the United States by disabling our computers and communications by sudden cyber-attack if hostilities break out.
He details how China’s government funds our Universities and places its spies inside them to purloin the results of academic R&D; and how China subverts Hollywood by demanding rewrites of movie scripts that show China’s government in an unfavorable light.
Alas, after sounding the fire alarm, Newt talks more in generalities than in recommending specific responses in his "Conclusion: Where We Are and What We Must Do:"
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This strategy must include a framework for implementation fully as large as the challenge that we are trying to meet. We must ensure that every action needed for success is being done effectively, diligently, and efficiently...
Recognition: There is a recognition that there is a problem threatening the survival of our nation.
Debate: Public debate follows about how big and how real the danger is, which is paralleled by some bureaucratic moves toward containing the problem.
Consensus: A general consensus is formed (that is almost never unanimous) that the problem is real and must be solved.
Broader alliances. You are the key to American survival. Change on this scale must be citizen-based and must have a broad range of grassroots support. Your voice with family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers can make a difference. Your voice on social media, on talk radio, on blogs, at town hall meetings, and at presidential campaign rallies can make a difference...
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This seems a tepid response that puts consensus-building democracies at a disadvantage when a totalitarian state confronts them. We've been hearing it for the last twenty years, without effect on improving our four-to-one trade imbalance with China, or inhibiting China's government's theft of our companies' trade secrets, including millions of cyberattacks each day against our businesses, military, civil government, and individuals.
We should understand by now that China's government never keeps its word. In 2001, when China's government wanted WTO and GATT access to our markets, they promised to buy “millions of tons of U.S. beef” to balance the trade. They never bought so much as a single ounce until Trump induced them to buy token amounts through Hong Kong in 2017. Our trade imbalance only ever kept expanding at an ever-increasing rate, until it passed $400 billion last year. That is 4% of our economy being bled off to China every year. It’s no wonder their economy is growing at 6% and ours at 2%.
There’s also a discussion of the “America is deficient in in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math)” meme and therefore supposedly requires a government-sponsored crash program to expand education in these subjects. I believe this is a misdirection, because we were never deficient in STEM until we started offshoring STEM jobs to China.
For the past 30 years the quickest way to lose your job in the United States has been to be a computer science Ph.D., or an electrical, chemical, mechanical, or industrial engineer. The euphemisms we've created for beating American STEM people out of their jobs almost requires its own dictionary: {downsizing, offshoring, outsourcing, rightsizing, re-engineering, work force reductions, involuntary early retirement} and so on, make it clear that STEM people are not wanted by American companies. This is an attitude we can fix by ourselves that doesn’t depend on either China or our government spending more money.
I also wonder if “trade alliances” will restrain China. The now-defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership, said to be an alliance against China, was actually a treaty that allowed other countries to source production in China then sneak it into the U.S. duty free. Most other countries are aligned with China in wanting to dump exports in the United States without buying any made-in-USA products to balance the trade.
This book is a Chinese fire alarm. At least the alarm has been sounded, even if the firemen haven’t left the station!
- Hardcover: 416 pages
- Publisher: Center Street; 1st edition (October 22, 2019)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1546085076
- ISBN-13: 978-1546085072
- Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.6 x 9.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Customer Reviews: 38 customer reviews
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#21,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #28 in Asian Politics
- #1 in Political Trades and Tariffs
- #36 in National & International Security (Books)
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