In a 2010 episode of The Office Michael comes back from the dentist, terrified because he’d read a 2005 issue of Newsweek that warned "China Is On The Move."
He warns, "I want you all to imagine a world in which America is not the No. 1 superpower. Where forks are irrelevant. And where every man, woman and child is expected to learn how to play the cello."
Now almost 15 years since that episode aired (and almost 20 since the Newsweek article it references), it serves as an interesting time capsule to examine fears of China.
In some ways, those fears have been vindicated; in other ways, those fears are seemingly overblown and their proposed solutions ridiculous.
I’m reminded of those ridiculous ones when I see news about the so-called Countering CCP Drones Act bill that is currently before the U.S. Senate.
Having successfully passed the U.S. House this summer, the bill clamps down on the sale and use of products manufactured by a Chinese drone maker commonly known as DJI.
The bill has bipartisan support, with senators as varied as Mark Warner and Rick Scott having both voiced support for the drone ban.
DJI is the world’s largest manufacturer of drones, having created and marketed the technology to help industries as diverse as agriculture, filmmaking, and insurance.
DJI is as successful as it is because it was on the scene early, and when given the choice, consumers selected its superior products. (It’s called the free market. It’s pretty good.)
Rather than an arm of the Chinese government, DJI is privately held and controlled.
According to the bill’s sponsors, DJI drones "pose an unacceptable risk to U.S. national security."
One big knock against the company is that the Department of Defense has listed them as allegedly working for the China military.
If true, that would be a real concern — but DJI doesn’t make military drones and has pushed back hard on this presumption.
In fact, Reuters reported on Oct. 18, that DJI "asked a U.S. District Judge in Washington to order its removal from the Pentagon list designating it as a 'Chinese military company,' saying it is neither owned nor controlled by the Chinese military."
They argue that the DOD has no reason to list it at all as it makes commercial drones and doesn’t sell for military purposes to any government.
Critics also have concerns about privacy, which the drone maker has addressed with built-in privacy safeguards. Yet they cannot point to any specific vulnerabilities and conversely, according to the bill’s many critics, this is domestic competitors using their lobbying power to squash a foreign rival they can’t outsell.
From my time in Congress, I don’t ever remember a bill that targeted a specific company at the behest of its competitors: this is crony capitalism on steroids.
Moreover, the force that has the best chance of preventing war between America and China is commerce. There’s this wonderful globalist principle of Thomas Friedman’s called the Theory of the Golden Arches, where many years ago he observed that no two countries have gone to war if their economies are so developed they both have operating McDonald’s franchises.
People who buy stuff from each other don’t shoot each other.
I talked about it in my commencement address from business school, although Vladimir Putin has mostly smashed the Golden Arches theory with his nonsensical imperialism. But there seems to be no one in the Chinese government as foolish or violent as him.
Graham Allison posits in his book "Destined for War" that there are too many people on both sides of the Pacific who would lose too much if war breaks out — so only "accidental or otherwise inconsequential events could trigger a large-scale conflict."
China certainly poses a threat to the United States’ interests and international stability.
China is quite open about wanting to blow up our battleships, buying land near our domestic military installations, and subverting Democrat members of Congress with sex spies. China wants to invade Taiwan, which would cause a worldwide depression and inevitably come back to bite them.
If Peter Zeihan is to be believed, China’s economy is much more fragile than they want us to believe, making them much less scary.
But should China somehow take over the world, or even if they just try and fail, the consequences will be terrible.
These are the sorts of concerns that Congress should focus on addressing, not taking drones away from farmers, filmmakers, and insurance adjusters.
Stopping them from buying drones won’t hurt China as much as it hurts consumer choice and the ability of American businesses to operate at their full potential. It just plays into baseless fears about what drones could do, further stoked by DJI’s competitors, rather than looking at the facts and the Americans it ends up hurting most.
Similarly, that China episode of "The Office" ends with one of Michael’s cooler-headed employees calmly explaining that his "fears about China are a bit exaggerated," and Michael remembers that "Nobody can stop the USA."
I agree, so let’s not stop the free market from deciding winners and losers.
Jared Whitley is a longtime politico who has worked in the U.S. Congress, White House and defense industry. He is an award-winning writer, having won best blogger in the state from the Utah Society of Professional Journalists (2018) and best columnist from Best of the West (2016). He earned his MBA from Hult International Business School in Dubai. Read Jared Whitley's reports — More Here.
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