The Document referenced in the title was produced by The Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and The Chinese Communist Party (hereafter, The Committee) the week before last, to small fanfare.
[The Committee have their own website and the Document can be accessed there via this link Reset-Prevent-Build]
On reading through its 53-pages and 150-policy recommendations I see why it didn’t make a bigger splash. Even a summary would be a bore so I’ll try and make this quick.
In the preamble the Document references China’s ‘economic aggression’ since WTO accession in 2001 and states that China’s overarching goal is a strategic economic decoupling from the global economy with the aim of making the PRC less dependent on the U.S. and making the U.S. more dependent on it [?!].
It then maps out three ‘Pillars’ of what a U.S. counteroffensive should concern itself with. They are:
“Pillar I: Reset the Terms of Our Economic Relationship with the PRC”
“Pillar II: Stem the Flow of U.S. Capital and Technology Fueling the PRC Military Modernization and Human Rights Abuses”, and
“Pillar III: Invest in Technological Leadership and Build Collective Economic Resilience in Concert with Allies”
Recommendation follow each subject heading but what the Committee, who took testimony over 9-months, have done in fact is to have rounded up every whinge, moan, jab, beef and anti-China rant they found during their hearings and compiled them into an omnibus list/document.
Moreover and tellingly the word ‘should’ gets used 130 times, but ‘must’ appears only 27. What the piece ends up as, IMHO, is a summary of American harrumph, but amounts to little more. I also found no (major) official China Inc. push back which is also quite telling.
It’d be foolish to be dismissive however as a number of recommendations could, if they become more fully developed, present real problems to bilateral investment in time.
In that vein, the report mentions the Committee’s ongoing investigation into four (unnamed) venture capital funds, MSCI and Blackrock to determine if these firms have been complicit in facilitating fund flows deleterious to U.S. interests, about which I’m sure we’ll here more. Shein and Temu (but not TikTok for a change) also get a shout-out as having been in the Committee’s sights for unfair trading practices.
My final two pennyworth. The Report, in reality, is anodyne and a snore. The ongoing work of the The Committee though is worth keeping a closer eye on.
Happy Sunday and a Merry Christmas to all!
