北京以美國企業為目標 Matt Pottinger＠WSJ 20210326 Taimocracy摘譯

【縛雞之見】

We can see through the recent moves of Beijing that China needs U.S. investments and technology eagerly.  Either hardline or soft-line, Chinese leaders do not hesitate to reveal the eagerness.
 Since China holds the second large GDP in the world and about to pass over the U.S., the “decoupling” has a potential disadvantage, according to the author, that China may hold some half of the business community around the world to compete with the U.S. 
China believes that there are always some western CEOs who depend on China, the huge market, more than rely on the U.S.  China can use them as the tokens confronting and standing-off the democratic world.
 Yes, many CEOs are the citizens of the Democracies.  It is very difficult to distinguish and isolate them from those who choose Democracy.  The Democracies will face a harsh situation: the demons with the dress of the Reverend.

Beijing Targets American Business      Matt Pottinger＠WSJ 20210326 Taimocracy摘譯

The U.S. and China’s Communist Party are strategic and ideological competitors.  CEOs have to decide which side they want to help win.美國和中國共產黨是戰略和意識形態的競爭者。CEO必須決定他們想幫助哪一方。

In the weeks that surrounded President Biden’s inauguration, Chinese leaders waged an information campaign aimed at the U.S.  Their flurry of speeches, letters and announcements was not, as the press first assumed, addressed mainly to the new administration.  It was an effort to target the U.S. business community.

The Communist Party’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, spoke to a virtual audience of American business leaders and former government officials in early February. 楊潔箎在2月初對美國商業領袖和前政府官員的虛擬聽眾演講。 He painted a rosy picture of investment and trade opportunities in China before warning that Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan are “red lines” that Americans would do well to keep quiet about.  Mr. Yang excoriated Trump administration policies toward China and was unsubtle in pressing his audience to lobby the Biden administration to reverse them.

General Secretary Xi Jinping, seated before a mural of the Great Wall of China, beamed himself to business elites in Davos, Switzerland, in late January.  He urged them to resist efforts by European and American policy makers to “decouple” segments of their economies from China’s.  Mr. Xi also wrote a personal letter to a prominent U.S. businessman exhorting him to “make active efforts to promote China-U.S. economic and trade cooperation.”

To make clear that these were requirements, not suggestions, Beijing announced sanctions on nearly 30 current or former U.S. government officials (me among them).  These were in addition to the sanctions Beijing placed on American human-rights activists, pro-democracy foundations and some U.S. senators last year.

Beijing’s message is unmistakable: You must choose.  If you want to do business in China, it must be at the expense of American values. 北京的訊息是明確的：您必須選擇。如果想在中國做生意，那一定要犧牲美國價值。 You will meticulously ignore the genocide of ethnic and religious minorities inside China’s borders; you must disregard that Beijing has reneged on its major promises—including the international treaty guaranteeing a “high degree of autonomy” for Hong Kong; and you must stop engaging with security-minded officials in your own capital unless it’s to lobby them on Beijing’s behalf.

Another notable element of Beijing’s approach is its explicit goal of making the world permanently dependent on China, and exploiting that dependency for political ends. 其明確的目標是使世界永久依賴於中國，並利用這種依賴來達到政治目的。 Mr. Xi has issued guidance, institutionalized this month by his rubber-stamp parliament, that he’s pursuing a grand strategy of making China independent of high-end imports from industrialized nations while making those nations heavily reliant on China for high-tech supplies and as a market for raw materials.  In other words, decoupling is precisely Beijing’s strategy—so long as it’s on Beijing’s terms. 他奉行一項宏偉的戰略，使中國脫離工業化國家的高端進口，同時使這些國家高度依賴中國提供高科技產品和原材料市場。 換句話說，脫鉤恰恰是北京的戰略-只要符合北京的條件。

Even more remarkable, the Communist Party is no longer hiding its reasons for pursuing such a strategy.  In a speech Mr. Xi delivered early last year, published only in late October in the party’s leading theoretical journal, Qiu Shi, he said China “must tighten international production chains’ dependence on China” with the aim of “forming powerful countermeasures and deterrent capabilities.” 他說，中國「必須加強國際生產鏈對中國的依賴」，以「形成有力的對策和威懾力」。

This phrase—“powerful countermeasures and deterrent capabilities”強大的反制力和威懾力—is party jargon for offensive leverage.  Beijing’s grand strategy is to accumulate and exert economic leverage to achieve its political objectives around the world. 北京的大戰略是積累和發揮經濟槓桿作用，以實現其在全世界的政治目標。

Here’s a recent example: After building significant trade volume with Australia over the years, Beijing last year suddenly began restricting imports of Australian wine, beef and barley for purely political reasons. 經過多年與澳大利亞的大量貿易往來，去年北京突然基於純粹的政治原因開始限制澳大利亞葡萄酒，牛肉和大麥的進口。 Beijing released a list of 14 “disputes”—political demands of the Australian government.  They include rolling back Australian laws designed to counter Beijing’s covert influence operations in Australian politics and society and even muzzling Australia’s free press to suppress news critical of China. 這些措施包括撤銷旨在抵制北京在澳洲政治和社會中的秘密影響力活動的澳洲法律，甚至壓制批評中國的新聞以摧毀澳洲新聞自由。

Australia’s travails are a foretaste of what Beijing has in store for the rest of the world. 澳洲的遭遇是北京在世界其他地方作為的前車之鑑。 American businessmen, wishing for simple, lucrative commercial ties, have long resisted viewing U.S.-China relations as an ideological struggle.  But strategic guidance issued by the leaders of both countries make clear the matter is settled: The ideological dimension of the competition is inescapable, even central. 競爭含著意識形態層面是不可避免的，甚至是核心部分。

Mr. Biden this month published his Interim National Security Strategic Guidance.  The document puts China in a category by itself as “the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system.”

In his signed introduction to the document, Mr. Biden wrote: “I believe we are in the midst of a historic and fundamental debate about the future direction of our world.  There are those who argue that, given all the challenges we face, autocracy is the best way forward....  We must prove that our model isn’t a relic of history; it’s the single best way to realize the promise of our future.” 拜登：「我相信我們正在就我們的世界的未來方向進行歷史性和根本性辯論。有些人認為，鑑於我們面臨的所有挑戰，專制獨裁是前進的最佳方式…。我們必須證明我們的模式不是歷史遺物； 這是實現我們對未來的承諾的最佳方法。」

This candor is helpful.  Beijing’s dirty secret is that Mr. Xi, in his internal speeches, has for years been describing the competition in precisely these ideological terms.  Consider a passage from his seminal speech—kept secret for six years—to the Communist Party Central Committee on Jan. 5, 2013.

“There are people who believe that communism is an unattainable hope, or even that it is beyond hoping for—that communism is an illusion….  Facts have repeatedly told us that Marx and Engels’s analysis of the basic contradictions in capitalist society is not outdated, nor is the historical-materialist view that capitalism is bound to die out and socialism is bound to win.  This is an inevitable trend in social and historical development.  But the road is tortuous.  The eventual demise of capitalism and the ultimate victory of socialism will require a long historical process to reach completion.” 習近平：「有些人認為共產主義是無法實現的希望，或者甚至是無法企盼的-共產主義是一種幻想……。 事實屢屢告訴我們，馬克思和恩格斯對資本主義社會基本矛盾的分析並非過時，歷史唯物主義觀點也不認為資本主義必將消亡而社會主義必將獲勝。 這是社會歷史發展的必然趨勢。 但是這條路是曲折的。 資本主義的最終滅亡和社會主義的最終勝利將需要一個漫長的歷史過程才能完成。」

The Biden and Xi quotations are almost mirror images of each other. 拜登與習近平的發言幾乎一致。 The president’s quotation serves as a belated American rejoinder to Mr. Xi’s furtive call for the defeat of capitalism and democracy, which he made during President Obama’s first term.習近平在歐巴馬後期做出如此要打敗資本主義的陰謀定論，而拜登現在才珊珊來遲。

Mr. Biden’s guidance also signals that while his tactics will deviate from the Trump administration’s, there is significant continuity in U.S. strategy. 拜登與川普容有不同，但美國戰略有重大延續性。 It reflects the bipartisan consensus on China that has emerged over the past few years.  No wonder, then, that Beijing is focusing its influence activities on other segments of American society, the business community in particular.  Beijing knows that its efforts to influence Washington are increasingly in vain.

So what should American CEOs do? First, they should come to grips with how much the situation has changed over the past few years—and acknowledge that those changes are almost certainly here to stay.

CEOs will find it increasingly difficult to please both Washington and Beijing. CEO雙邊討好已不可能。 Mr. Biden’s strategic guidance flatly states: “We will ensure that U.S. companies do not sacrifice American values in doing business in China.” Chinese leaders, as mentioned, are issuing high-decibel warnings that multinationals must abandon such values as the price of doing business in China. 中國提出警告：向在中國做生意，跨國公司與人必須放棄價值。 Like sailors straddling two boats, American companies are likely to get wet.

One prudent step would be for CEOs to review formally how the new geopolitical reality affects them on both sides of the Pacific. 要正式檢視地緣政治的新情勢 The great-power competition with China has introduced a thicket of new regulatory, fiduciary and reputational risks to which corporations are only waking up.  Beijing’s intensifying use of extrajudicial tools is another threat. 北京加緊使用法外工具是另一個威脅 The Communist leadership’s decision to take hostage two Canadian citizens, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, is a case in point. 抓兩位加拿大人

Another prudent step would be to draw up contingencies for diversifying supply chains. 制訂緊急措施並分散供應鏈 The rush to concentrate so much of the world’s manufacturing on the east coast of an autocratically ruled country was an aberration, and an unsustainable one.

No one in Washington is seriously threatening a wholesale decoupling of the two economies.  That’s a straw-man argument put forward by Chinese propagandists and a few alarmists here at home.  But decoupling of a more limited variety—particularly in key technologies—is well under way, as it should be.  In the Trump administration, we called it “selective decoupling.” Some Biden administration officials use the term “managed decoupling.” Sen. Tom Cotton and others on Capitol Hill have adopted “targeted decoupling.” When so many different political voices are using such similar language, CEOs need to pay attention.華盛頓沒有人揚言這兩個經濟體的全面脫鉤。那是中國宣傳家和一些國內的危言聳聽者提出的一種誤導論點。但是，應該進行有限種類的脫鉤，尤其是在關鍵技術中，脫鉤正在順利進行。在川普政府中，我們稱其為「選擇性脫鉤」。一些拜登政府官員使用了「有管理的脫鉤」一詞。參議員Tom Cotton和國會山上的其他人已採用「定向脫鉤」。當這麼多不同的政治聲音使用類似的語言時，CEO就需要引起注意。

A favorite analogy in Beijing and Washington is that our countries are running a marathon, and only one contestant will win.  It’s a fine metaphor, but it’s closer to the truth that we’re in a 400-meter dash that we have to win to qualify for the next leg of the marathon. 要先跑贏400公尺（4年任期）衝刺，才能贏得馬拉松。 If, over the next four years, we fail to set the right conditions, we could put ourselves on track to lose the race, although we might not realize it until several years after it’s too late to win.

Above all, it will require America and its allies to consider in every policy we adopt, every bill we introduce, and every partnership that government and industry undertake, whether it increases our collective leverage in this competition or surrenders leverage to a hostile dictatorship in Beijing.  The present balance of the leverage is heavily in our favor.  It’s up to us to keep it that way.

Beijing knows it is in a sprint, too.  Mr. Xi’s January 2013 speech shows he is aware that members of his own party harbor doubts about their system.  His fellow party members know its advantages are fleeting and its shortcomings—including waste, bureaucratic inertia, and the unforgivingly magnified consequences of each miscalculation—will start to show before too long, if they haven’t already.

Beijing is trying to engineer victory from the mind of a single leader; free societies like ours harness the human spirit.  Therein lies our ultimate advantage. 北京正在透過領導人的心向、開放社會，箝制人文精神來打造其勝利之路。 The Communist Party’s leaders are right about one thing: American CEOs, their boards and their investors have to decide which side they want to help win. 中共領導人正確的：逼美國CEO、董事會與投資者必須選擇要站在哪一邊。

Mr. Pottinger served as deputy White House national security adviser, 2019-21.  This is adapted from a speech he delivered at the Hoover Institution March 10.

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