But the White House cited no financial commitments, and there is sharp disagreement among the United States and its allies about how to respond to Chinaâs rising power.
Mr. Biden has made challenging a rising China and a disruptive Russia the centerpiece of a foreign policy designed to build up democracies around the world as a bulwark against spreading authoritarianism. Beijing, for its part, has pointed to the poor U.S. response to the pandemic and divisive American politics â particularly the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol â as signs that democracy is failing.
Biden seems to have picked up another Trump trick: get other people to pay for your pet projects.
Faced with an urgent competitive threat from China, the Senate is poised to pass the most expansive industrial policy legislation in U.S. history, blowing past partisan divisions over government support for private industry to embrace a nearly quarter-trillion-dollar investment in building up Americaâs manufacturing and technological edge.
The legislation, which is scheduled for a vote on Tuesday afternoon, is expected to pass by a large margin. That alone is a testament to how commercial and military competition with Beijing has become one of the few issues that can unite both political parties.
It is an especially striking shift for Republicans, who are following the lead of former President Donald J. Trump and casting aside what was once their partyâs staunch opposition to government intervention in the economy. Now, both parties are embracing an enormous investment in semiconductor manufacturing, artificial intelligence research, robotics, quantum computing and a range of other technologies.
And while the billâs sponsors are selling it in part as a jobs plan, the debate over its passage has been laced with Cold War references and warnings that a failure to act would leave the United States perilously dependent on its biggest geopolitical adversary.
The CPA (Capitalist Party of America) supports The People's Industries to counter foreign imperialism!
Ms. Fazili said that cabinet departments had embarked on a governmentwide effort âto really diagnose the problems, understand whatâs going on out there in these markets, and see what actions can be taken to close those vulnerabilities.â
As part of the initiative, the Department of Agriculture has allocated more than $4 billion to bolster âa resilient food supply chainâ that would prevent or lessen shortages, she added.
The initiative was bundled with the creation of âtrade strike forceâ targeting China and other countries to push back âon unfair foreign competition, unfair foreign subsidies and other trade practices that have adversely impacted U.S. manufacturing.â
For months, Ding was locked in a 170-square-foot workersâ dormitory near a Chinese smelting facility in Konawe, Indonesia, where he had been assigned to carry out one of his countryâs vaunted âBelt and Roadâ projects.
The 40-year-old native of Chinaâs Henan province, who gave only his surname out of security fears, said a guard kept watch at his door. When the coronavirus ravaged the dorm in November, he developed a 102-degree fever. Still, he could not leave.
Finally, earlier this year, Ding pulled apart the plastic bars on a rear window and climbed out, fleeing on a motorbike driven by a friend. âIt was like I went to hell and back,â he said. âI had no other choice but to escape.ââ¯
Interviews with labor rights advocates and a dozen Chinese workers employed by state-owned companies and subcontractors reflect a pattern of abuse that threatens to undermine Chinaâs ambitious bidâ¯for diplomatic and economic influence, a mission closely tied to the legacy of leader Xi Jinping. Many spoke on the condition of full or partial anonymity, fearing retribution.
New York-based China Labor Watch asserts in a new report that overseas Chinese workers are victims of human trafficking and forced labor. Workers described being held against their will, forced to work while infected with the coronavirus and deceived into working illegally. Their passports were seized, they said, and most had gone months without pay. Some said they were beaten for protesting conditions or forced into âthought training.â
âThe entire Belt and Road initiative is based on forced labor,â said Li Qiang, director of China Labor Watch, whose report was drawn from interviews with workers in six countries. âChinese authorities want the Belt and Road projects for political gain and need to use these workers.â
Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, notes, âBiden is very much a creature of Cold War bipartisanship. His comfort zone was established by this western alliance against the Soviet Union and communism. Therefore I was worried during the campaign that (Biden) was going to try to reconstitute bipartisanship in foreign policy while pursuing a more partisan agenda domestically. Thatâs precisely what has happened.â
Tang speculates the Belt and Road Initiative is targeted because it isolates U.S. trade power and therefore reduces U.S. sanction power. The appropriation is part of a larger $1.5 billion Countering Chinese Influence Fund to combat the âmalign influence of the Chinese Communist Party globally.â The act also requires that the Committee of Foreign Investment review any higher institution donation above $1 million for fear of espionage. Senator Mitt Romney recently said heâs âvery, very reluctant to bring in students from China ... here to steal technology.â
Indeed, the same people and organizations calling China a grave threat nakedly reveal the real reason for American brinkmanship. The Council on Foreign Relations reports in 2015 that âpreserving U.S. primacy in the global system ought to remain the central objective ... in the twenty-first century.â President Biden himself wrote in 2020, âThe Biden foreign policy agenda will place the U.S. back at the head of the table.⦠The world does not organize itself.â
China is not a threat because itâs attacking U.S. soil. China is a threat because it threatens American global hegemony. Here the underlying logic of Yellow Peril becomes clear. Proliferating the false idea that China will take over the West rationalizes starting conflict in the Asia-Pacific; this nearly perfectly parallels the geopolitical theater of a century ago. The Yellow Peril, the faceless horde, the ever-growing yellow population, an existential threat to the West, to liberal human rights, to the market economy, to the ârules-basedâ order, to American primacy.
Who we define as our international enemy, or perhaps just competitor, also becomes our enemy at home. These incidents are not accidentsâthey are collateral damageâbecause Yellow Peril and its relatives xenophobia, sinophobia, anti-Asian racism, and McCarthyism have always been tremendously useful in building consensus in the American public.
Grazier describes a military-industrial-congressional complex first warned of by President Eisenhower in 1961. Defense industry money drives increased military budgets in three ways:defense contracts, operating like pork barrel, that impact the districts and constituents of members of congress; political contributions to congressional campaigns and at least $100 million in annual defense lobbying; and the funding of a national security elite, including $1 billion for think tanks such as the Center for New American Security, the Atlantic Council, and the Council on Foreign Relations, which launder industry interests through mainstream media.
In the United States, we commonly understand âYellow Perilâ as a xenophobic response to influxes of Chinese laborers. Yellow Peril produced national shames such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which remains the first and only ban on all immigrants from an ethnic group. But the propaganda also supported foreign policy. In the late nineteenth century, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany supposedly dreamed of Buddha seated on a dragon, threatening to invade Europe. He used Yellow Peril (die Gelbe Gefahr) to build alliances with other imperialist nations and justify invading China first lest the East conquer the West. In the Opium Wars of the 1840s, the U.S. and other Western nations killed 30,000 Chinese people so that they could forcibly sell opium to civilians, while notable Americans and elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton built their wealth on opium colonialism. This is the foundational moment of U.S.-China relations.
Critical to this contemporary promotion of Yellow Peril is the image of China as the military aggressor. But right now, the U.S. has 800 overseas military bases, half of them encircling China. China has one (in Djibouti). The U.S. spends more on defense than the next 10 nations combined, including China. The U.S. has extensively planned for a naval blockade of China, cutting off its oil supply. The U.S. has 20 times the nuclear warheads of China and yet is still spending an additional $100 billion to build up a new nuclear arms arsenal. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has stationed 130,000 troops in the region, conducting nearly daily military exercises with drones, missile drills, helicopters, island hopping and more, according to Madison Tang, campaign coordinator at CODEPINK. âThese military exercises create accidents. These exercises can be provocations in and of themselves. Thereâs a lot of military brinkmanship happening where American forward posturing (is being) framed as defensive,â says Tang.
And UFOs are back too...
Give the Yellow Peril stuff a rest. Its a smoke screen / dog whistle that people who are friends or supporters of the CCP use to further discord rather than encourage any constructive dialog and agreement on solutions.
The CCP is not a friend of mine now does it have my country's best interests in its plans for the future. Nor does it have the best interests of its own citizens in its plans. And it does not pretend to either.
In the United States, we commonly understand âYellow Perilâ as a xenophobic response to influxes of Chinese laborers. Yellow Peril produced national shames such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which remains the first and only ban on all immigrants from an ethnic group. But the propaganda also supported foreign policy. In the late nineteenth century, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany supposedly dreamed of Buddha seated on a dragon, threatening to invade Europe. He used Yellow Peril (die Gelbe Gefahr) to build alliances with other imperialist nations and justify invading China first lest the East conquer the West. In the Opium Wars of the 1840s, the U.S. and other Western nations killed 30,000 Chinese people so that they could forcibly sell opium to civilians, while notable Americans and elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton built their wealth on opium colonialism. This is the foundational moment of U.S.-China relations.
Critical to this contemporary promotion of Yellow Peril is the image of China as the military aggressor. But right now, the U.S. has 800 overseas military bases, half of them encircling China. China has one (in Djibouti). The U.S. spends more on defense than the next 10 nations combined, including China. The U.S. has extensively planned for a naval blockade of China, cutting off its oil supply. The U.S. has 20 times the nuclear warheads of China and yet is still spending an additional $100 billion to build up a new nuclear arms arsenal. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has stationed 130,000 troops in the region, conducting nearly daily military exercises with drones, missile drills, helicopters, island hopping and more, according to Madison Tang, campaign coordinator at CODEPINK. âThese military exercises create accidents. These exercises can be provocations in and of themselves. Thereâs a lot of military brinkmanship happening where American forward posturing (is being) framed as defensive,â says Tang.
Good thing trump was playing 3-dimensional chess when he backed out of the nuclear deal with Iran and increased tensions by killing their general. Because incentivising them to make agreements with the Chinese is clearly a brilliant move to bolster American power.
