China’s Biggest Investment Partner Is Not Who You’d Expect
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i'm really curious about the situation in europe because i know china really attempted to get the belton road into europe buying the port of piraeus and greece uh everything in the east the former soviet countries joined the belt and road italy joined the belt and road um although italy has recently left the belt and road well yeah so overall i would say their attempts to get the belt and road into europe

ultimately hit a roadblock and they couldn't make much more progress now with uh potentially uh european leaders thinking they need to that they've been abandoned by the us or they need to abandon the us is there a chance that china could come back into europe and position itself as a new partner sure so i i think one of the one of the convenient strategic ploys that the ccp

has mastered at this point is if they sense that there's a partner nation that is hesitant to sign on the dotted line to be an official belt and road partner that's not the end of the story which which i think is unfortunate but if you look at the levels of investment between a lot of western european countries and china

These numbers have been very, very high for a very long time. And there is no nation that has higher levels of investment with China than the United States. And the United States is not a Belt and Road partner. So the little twist here is...

maybe there's not an official MOU that is signed. Maybe Chinese state-owned enterprises aren't building public projects in some of these Western countries. Although, I will say, with Huawei, before the Trump administration in his first term went on that public push throughout Western Europe to convince NATO allies to not invite Huawei into their 5G telecommunication systems,

a lot of these nations had just decided to do so or were on the verge of doing so. And once you bring Huawei into your telecommunications, you're essentially part of the digital Silk Road, whether you are officially or not. And I think this is a game that the CCP has been able to play pretty well. If there's political hesitancy to join officially,

They don't become inherently antagonistic because of that. They find unofficial ways to increase that economic cooperation. And there's a real political downstream impact from that. And we've seen this in the United States. Look at how hard it was to pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act a few years ago. We shouldn't have slave labor produced goods in America. That should be one of the most non-controversial things

policy ideas anyone could say because everybody should hate slavery however the chamber of commerce lobbied against that bill i think apple lobbied against that bill and a number of other companies nike that's right that's right why because their market the success of that those companies are dependent on their access to the chinese market

So what I'm saying is that dependencies can look a lot of different ways. And even if you're not an official BRI partner, that doesn't mean you're not compromised. And we all know that. But I think that's something that maybe a lot of Americans don't.

um don't fully grasp and a lot of our political elites haven't told that story as they should but it's it's real nonetheless yeah it's and this is a real concern for Taiwan I feel because as we've seen with Ukraine uh Europe is still deeply dependent on Russian energy

So I'd hate to see a situation where China attempts an invasion of Taiwan and we have a bunch of people hanging Taiwanese flags and putting them on their bios on social media.

But because of all these economic ties through the Belt and Road and other, as you mentioned, we're still just funding that invasion. That's right. And I think that is precisely the correct way to talk about it. Not only would we be funding the war machine of the People's Liberation Army in China, to put an even finer point on it, we're funding our own potential destruction.

This is why restricting outbound investment to the People's Republic of China matters. And Congress tried to do this last year, and it became a victim of domestic politics in November and December, and it never passed Congress. But when we, and we meaning American companies,

When we invest in any Chinese entity that has a dual-use implication, that maybe the company isn't officially affiliated with China's military, but the technology in question has military or defense implications, we are investing in our own destruction. I think the most poignant example of this, if we all think back to Tiananmen Square, the massacre in 1989, of course, the tanks rolled in, killed people.

hundreds, thousands of people. But then after the immediate crisis was over, Chinese authorities went hunting for the dissidents that escaped. And the security cameras that they used to track and find individuals, those cameras were made by American companies and British companies. And then six years later, American companies

in cooperation with the World Bank, installed those exact same cameras in Tibet, a region long known for political repression in China. So when we cooperate in any sense, technologically especially, with Chinese companies, let's not fool ourselves. We know what the party is using this for. It's not just domestic internal repression. It's part of their external belligerence and their ambition.

to subsume Taiwan. So all of this matters. And I think the lack of seriousness and just frankly, the lack of willing to be truthful about what's really happening here is just shocking. Yeah, I hadn't heard that security camera story before, but it reminded me years ago, I think there was a lawsuit against Cisco in the U.S. brought by Falun Gong because Cisco had

you know, helped build the firewall, the Great Firewall in China. And they had a presentation that was found in discovery in this lawsuit that it was a PowerPoint where they were essentially trying to pitch their services to the CCP. And they were like, oh, yes, we can, you know, do all this stuff. And here's how we can help China's Golden Shield, which is the firewall and all this stuff, into seeing

this American company basically with dollar signs in their eyes going like, here's how we can help you repress your people and cut them off from the internet and like find people that are trying to like hide from you and, you know, persecute them. Yeah. Specifically in that PowerPoint, they were like, this will be very good at helping you go after the fallen gong. Painful. Yeah. I have not heard that before. So number one, thank you for sharing that. Number two, it's, it's the latest example, sad example of,

of an American company that's not behaving as an American company. And listen, I understand that shareholder capitalism means we, like these companies have realities they need to answer to. They need to maximize the value of the company for shareholders. I get it. But at what point do you cease to, like, at what point do you completely lose all semblance, not just of patriotism, but of right and wrong?

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