Editor's note: On November 11-12, 2020, the 6th China and Globalization Forum (CCG) was held in Beijing. During the free speech at the Sino-US Online Forum on the 11th, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and Chairman of Hong Kong Hang Lung Group Chen Qizong successively expressed their personal views on the future direction of Sino-US relations, the content is very wonderful, observer network hereby collate the two speeches, and will be released separately for the reference of readers.
The China and Globalization Forum held the Sino-US and China-EUROPE Online Forum on the 11th Picture from ccG
Among them, Friedman's statement maintains the New York Times' consistent attitude toward China, and its position observer network does not agree. However, Friedman also bluntly pointed out the "structural contradictions" in his eyes to U.S.-Us relations and predicted the "dilemma" that the U.S. hostile policy toward China might lead to. In addition, the logic of thinking of the United States when viewing countries with "different values" conveyed in its discourse is also worthy of attention.
【Editor/Observer Network Bai Ziwen】
The following is Thomas Friedman's free speech, published as part one:
Thanks to the moderator. Let me make a few quick points. I believe that the year 1979-2019 was an epic chapter in the U.S.-China relationship, which I call "unconscious integration." However, the epic is over.
This kind of unconscious integration, for American companies, wants to open factories in China, wants to establish supply chains in China, wants to hire Chinese scientists, wants to let their daughters study in Shanghai schools; for Chinese companies, wants to go public on the NASDAQ, wants to cooperate with American companies, and wants their children to go to Harvard University or Ohio State University. While this integration is not necessarily completely unconscious, in the past 40 years, China and the United States have indeed achieved "one country, two systems," and China and the United States have become truly "one country, two systems." But that era is over.
Thomas Friedman speaks online forum video screenshot
Why is it over? I think there are two main reasons.
The first reason is how China is trying to move from poverty to middle income. I think China has adopted a broad-based strategy: working incredibly hard, incredibly "delayed gratification," resisting the process of immediately responding to temptations to reap returns later, being very focused on infrastructure investment, very focused on investing in education, "stealing" other people's intellectual property, "forcing" technology transfers, "not complying" with WTO rules, and engaging in "non-reciprocal" trade layouts. Basically, that's how I think China went from poverty to middle income.
I would say that for 30 to 35 of the last 40 years, U.S. businesses have been a key factor in the stability of relations between the two countries. Despite the fact that there are a lot of things that American companies don't like in the trade process, everyone is still making money. As a result, U.S. companies will tell the U.S. government that "it's okay, it's okay." This keeps relations between the two countries on track.
However, in the past 5 years, a considerable number of companies believe that the balance between "good behavior" and "bad behavior" in Sino-US trade has begun to become more. They continued to speak to the U.S. government and facilitated the rise of Donald Trump. My view has always been that Donald Trump is not a U.S.-born U.S. president, but a Chinese-induced U.S. president. He advocated a setback in relations between the two countries and loudly emphasized some of these bad behaviors. This is the background to the birth of Trump, and I'm sure Chinese will have a different view of this, but that's my point of view. A series of problems have led to the collapse of the relationship model that has lasted for 40 years, and on top of this is Donald Trump.
The second reason is that for 30 of the past 40 years, Chinese goods have been sold to us with "shallow goods", shirts on the body, socks wrapped around the feet, shoes on the feet, or our rooftop solar panels. What the United States sells to China is "deep goods," software, chips, and other things that go deep into China's systems. China used to have to buy our deep products because it had no choice but to make software, chips and other high-tech products.
And what has happened in the last 5 years is that China can now make deep products. Huawei's whole story is really just the tip of this iceberg. China can now make chatbots buried in our sidewalks, embedded in our bedrooms, burrowed into the walls of our companies or deep in our Pentagon.
As the U.S.-China relationship has evolved, the fundamental structural problem now is that we don't have enough trust to buy Deep Chinese products. When China only sells shallow products, frankly, we don't care at all whether China is authoritarian, liberal, or "vegan" (laughs sarcastically). It doesn't matter to us at all, we're just buying your shallow products. However, when China wants to sell us deep, very deep products, the differences in values between the two systems become an insurmountable structural problem.
I don't know how far this relationship will develop. I fully agree with Graham (forum guest and Thucydides Trap proposer) that the two elements of climate and nuclear weapons force us and the United States to work together. But now we have to work together in a thoughtful way, which is complicated.
The competition between Samsung and Apple is nothing. What is the relationship between Huawei and Qualcomm? Huawei is Qualcomm's customers, suppliers, competitors, partners, and co-setters of global telecommunications standards, and they have five different layers of relationships. As a result, Trump said [to American companies] that you can no longer sell chips [to China]. If there hadn't been a COVID-19 pandemic, we would have been talking about the "death sentence" we've "sentenced" to China's leading technology and China's telecommunications exports. By telling U.S. companies that you cannot sell Huawei the chips, software, and operating systems necessary for Huawei as a technology company, you are "sentencing the death penalty" to China's largest (technology) company.
China will not sit idly by. You can see where their next five-year plan is headed. They're trying to build a complete chip supply chain, from the demand side to the supply side, so that they will never, never, ever rely on our chips again. They're not doing very well yet, and China isn't as good at chip manufacturing as Intel and Qualcomm. But I think they're going to do better and better. About 70 percent of the chips in Chinese products now come from the United States. If China masters the supply chain, even if not this year, not next year, but five years from now, what are we going to sell to China? They won't buy our Boeing again because Boeing won't let them fly. And if they don't buy our chips, we'll just sell them soybeans.
So what I'm trying to say is, what the hell are we doing? The United States has declared war on China's largest (technology) company, and maybe Huawei is "gathering information" from every customer around the world. But we'd better sit down, come up with some evidence, think about what we're all doing, whether there's a possibility, and tell Huawei: We're allowing you to provide telecommunications equipment to Idaho, and we'll see what you do, and we'll watch you for a few years. If we don't decently get Chinese companies to join the global standard, we'll end up living within the digital Berlin Wall, a "dual-tech" world.
By the way, don't think that the EU will be on our side. What happens to Intel when China becomes the world's largest market, when Samsung can compete in the Chinese market and we can't? How does Intel compete with Samsung in Europe?
I don't believe in this [Trump] administration, they're beautifully planned, they're a great team, but they don't know what they're doing. They are desperate to launch a trade war, creating the current situation. This is not a truly profound strategic plan. In the U.S. semiconductor industry, I bet none of them will vote for Trump, they're all businessmen. The semiconductor industry is the jewel in our hands. And this administration is shaking their situation.
Are any people talking to me about what their strategy is? Please, I listen. But I've been keeping an eye on the whole thing from the start. U.S. farmers have also suffered heavy losses in this trade war. American taxpayers have spent billions of dollars to bail them out while they are still bleeding. The semiconductor industry is also in chaos. I don't know what the future holds. Those are my two points.
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