No Money, No Nukes: Time to Bankrupt China's Regime
by Gordon G. Chang • April 10, 2023 at 5:00 am
America can stop China's nuclear weapons development and other monumental programs.
The Chinese Communist Party needs America for, among other things, money, and the U.S. does not have to provide it.
In reality, China's economy in 2022, after price adjustments, almost certainly contracted, perhaps by as much as 3%.
Exports fell 6.8% year-on-year. More significantly, imports, one of the best reflections of domestic demand, plunged 10.2%.
"Everything is down, whether plane travel, freight, or buying on the Alibaba platforms." — Anne Stevenson-Yang, author of China Alone: Return to Isolation, to Gatestone, April 2023.
China, therefore, needs factory orders from abroad and foreign investment. The American president can crimp both of these lifelines by, among other things, using his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 and by joining or liberalizing free-trade agreements with other countries. For instance, U.S. President Joe Biden could encourage factories to move to the Western hemisphere by making a few fixes to the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). The American market is the largest in the world, and the president can use it to redirect trade flows.
"We now know that China spent $240 billion on country bailouts from 2008 to 2021, correlating with a drop in Chinese lending for infrastructure projects that are the core of this Belt and Road Initiative. It is clear that China is now overstretched and unable to continue with the BRI overall plan into the foreseeable future." — China analyst Charles Burton of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, to Gatestone, April 2023.
Municipalities and cities across China have not been able to pay civil servant salaries and promised benefits, and for months there have been protests, even in wealthy cities like Wuhan in Hubei province and Dalian in Liaoning.
There is a lot America can do to stop China's fast buildup of its most dangerous arsenal, and in any case Americans must not under any circumstances fund, with trade and investment, the weapons pointed at them.
President Ronald Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by reducing the flow of cash to Moscow. It is now time to bankrupt China.
After all, no money, no nukes.
"We are probably not going to be able to do anything to stop, slow down, disrupt, interdict, or destroy the Chinese nuclear development program that they have projected out over the next 10 to 20 years," said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley on March 29 at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. "They're going to do that in accordance with their own plan."
Milley is wrong about China's nuclear weapons ambitions. He is, unfortunately, expressing the same pessimism that pervaded the Nixon, Ford and Carter years, when the American foreign policy establishment took the Soviet Union as a given and therefore promoted détente.
America can stop China's nuclear weapons development and other monumental programs.
The Chinese Communist Party needs America for, among other things, money, and the U.S. does not have to provide it.
