Caveat: President Trump might only be using a trillion-dollar investment in the US as a bargaining chip he would never use. If not, let’s hope he changes his mind.
Donald Trump is allegedly giving serious consideration to allowing China to make a massive investment in the U.S. China is offering to build $1 trillion in factories in the U.S. Some of his closest advisors warned against it.
Embedding them in our economy sounds like a terrible idea. They are already in our institutions, including universities.
If he thinks this is a good idea, it stems from a lack of understanding of the Chinese Communist Party, which runs their country.
When they invited American companies into China, they did it with the proviso that they share all their technology, so they did. General Electric, Intel, and Tesla all learned the hard way. Once China gets what it wants, it pushes the companies out. They also investigate and imprison people who don’t meet their needs.
As conservative Oren Cass, chief economist for American Compass, writes in the New York Times, it cannot work in reverse.
The United States cannot run that playbook in reverse. If those Chinese companies come to the United States, they will share no technology that the party does not want shared. To the contrary, there is ample reason to fear that they would use their new perch to steal American technology and gather sensitive data on American citizens, our economy, and our infrastructure. Indeed, China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law doesn’t just grant China’s intelligence services access to all private-sector business data; it affirmatively imposes the obligation that “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with the state intelligence work.”
China is a different story. Thanks in no small measure to the U.S. technology it appropriated, China now has the world’s best electric vehicles, and leads in nearly all other advanced industrial technologies as well. Allowed into the United States, Chinese carmakers will flood the market with cars that American firms cannot make and sell for anywhere near a comparable price. “The existential risk to the U.S. auto industry isn’t Chinese E.V.s alone. Cars present the most obvious example, but the same logic will apply to any other industry opened to Chinese investment. Vulnerability to China’s control over particular inputs like critical minerals has already proved a disaster for American security and resilience. Allowing China to develop vertically integrated control over entire supply chains on both sides of the Pacific would multiply that disaster many times over; it would be as damaging as the choice to welcome China into the World Trade Organization a generation ago.
His Advisors Won’t Like It
China is a communist nation. It will never conform to US values and will succeed in conquering us once it has economic power. China has this ideology built into its DNA.
President Trump’s administration includes people who are very aware of the dangers of the CCP, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Pentagon policy chief, Elbridge Colby, and Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative.
They expect President Trump to doggedly oppose the CCP.
The CCP has built farms near military bases. They have brazenly opened police stations in the US, and even set up biolabs. They don’t have our best interests at heart. Russia would be safer.
In recent weeks, Mr. Greer and Howard Lutnik, the commerce secretary, have both cast doubt on accepting Chinese investment. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned the Europeans not to move towards China.
China has slave labor, and they have a bottomless pit of money. This will be like the Belt and Road projects that have irrevocably tied some nations to China and its communist will.
Recently, President Trump gave China access to advanced AI chips, and he okayed 600,000 Chinese students. The problem is that Chinese nationals, and even naturalized citizens, must spy for China if asked.
Now, we could be inviting the rooster into the henhouse to do far worse.
If you want to read an in-depth article about the dangers, go to Oren Cass’s piece here.