The Chinese government and its authoritarianism, lack of concern for human rights, and more, poses a significant threat not just to persecuted minorities in China and those that want freedom, but also to the rest of the world. It’s something that governments on the world stage will have to confront eventually. I think that there’s ample room to discuss how politicians and left-wing political parties/organizations the world over can create an effective foreign policy platform with regards to how to curb China’s growing soft & hard power abroad and its human rights abuses in its own borders.
Yesterday I had written an exasperated and frustrated comment about how the neoliberal approach of playing by the rules haven’t worked. I think that playing by those rules hasn’t worked and won’t work because the ones who wrote those rules are the same people that are profiting off of the status-quo:
The status-quo can’t continue. The conservative and neoliberal paths have been tried, and failed miserably. The global left needs to formulate long-term and short-term policy goals that seek to curtail China’s authoritarian nature and human rights abuses. These policy goals need to be rooted in things such as economic justice, social justice, and facts and reason.
One short-term policy goal that I think would help to keep China from growing its soft power is banning Huawei equipment from 5G networks. The main non-Huawei players in 5G are Nokia (Finland), Samsung (Korea), and Ericsson(Sweden). The current Huawei ban has a dearth of evidence. A new Huawei ban based on the reasoning that letting China project soft power through allowing its businesses that are tied with the state to become crucial parts of global telecom infrastructure is very bad, especially when we have other countries that don’t do the same shit as China that we can get equipment from.
One long-term policy goal I can also think of is to increase the diversity of countries that people can source materials and components from as part of their supply chains, as well as increasing the redundancy and resiliency of domestic supply chains. China simply cannot remain the world’s sole supplier of damn-near everything. American universities could work on new, innovative ways to safely and cleanly extract and refine rare-earth elements from untapped deposits here in the US. This, combined with funding research into potential breakthroughs in things like additive manufacturing/3D printing for metal parts and components, could bring about a revolution and massive cost reduction in domestic supply chains.
