Communists Are Not Our Friends

Surprise, surprise---this includes the Chinese:

China's communist leaders view the United States as their main enemy and are working in Asia and around the world to undermine U.S. alliances, said a former Chinese diplomat.
Chen Yonglin, until recently a senior political officer at the Chinese Consulate in Sydney, Australia, said in an interview that China also is engaged in large-scale intelligence-gathering activities in the United States that, in the past, netted large amounts of confidential U.S. government documents from agents.
"The United States is considered by the Chinese Communist Party as the largest enemy, the major strategic rival," Mr. Chen told The Washington Times in a telephone interview from Australia, where he is in hiding after breaking with Beijing in May.
All Chinese government officials are ordered to gather information about the United States, "no matter how trivial," he said. "The United States occupies a unique place in China's diplomacy," Mr. Chen said.
A pro-democracy activist who took part in the 1989 demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, Mr. Chen, 37, spent 10 years as a Foreign Ministry official. He said he defected and sought political asylum in Australia to highlight repression of the Chinese people by their government and the ruling Communist Party, as well as the repression of dissidents such as democracy activists and the Falun Gong spiritual group.
Most Chinese government activity in the United States involves information-gathering carried out by military-related intelligence officers or civilians linked to the Ministry of State Security, Mr. Chen said.
"I know that China once got a heavy load of confidential documents from the United States and sent it back to China through the Cosco ship," Mr. Chen said, referring to the state-owned China Ocean Shipping Co.
The information was "very useful" to China's military and related to "aircraft technology," he said.
The Chinese also send political police abroad to monitor overseas Chinese and others in North America who Beijing considers opponents of the regime, he said.

I used to travel to China quite frequently on business. The fact that companies over there are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Beijing kleptocracy was driven home right after the accidental bombing of a Chinese embassy a few years back. Every one of our Chinese suppliers immediately stopped shipment and halted production of our products, vowing to resume when we stopped bombing their embassies. The script was identical from each, despite being separated by hundreds of miles. The Communist Hive-Mind at work.

Which is why we need to put the kibosh on these kind of deals:

The current Chinese takeover movement is different from the earlier buying spree by Japanese companies. Japan was not a rival for influence in Asia, or in the world; China is. Japan was not a major competitor for scarce resources such as oil; China is. Japanese companies were privately owned; China's acquirers are state-run entities. Japan is a democratic country, and by and large an American ally; China most definitely is not. Japan did not engage in the wholesale theft of intellectual property, China does. Japan did not buy strategic assets: ownership of New York real estate has no implication for national security; ownership of oil resources does.

CNOOC's $20 billion, all-cash bid for Unocal is only one of several being made by the Chinese regime, eager to expand the international influence of its state-owned companies. Last week, China's Haier offered $1.3 billion for Maytag, the troubled manufacturer of home appliances, with 20,000 employees. That followed by a few months IBM's sale of its PC business to Lenovo, a Chinese computer maker, for $1.75 billion.

At this writing it is impossible to predict whether the CNOOC bid will succeed. It does top Chevron's offer by about $2 billion, but the American company is quite capable of raising its already-generous offer. Or Unocal's board might decide that the several relevant regulatory authorities are so likely to veto the CNOOC bid as a threat to American security, that it would be wise to accept the lower Chevron offer.

But whatever the outcome of CNOOC's decision to bid for a major American oil company, it has raised the temperature of the already red-hot dispute over trade policy. The authorities are starting to realize that U.S. companies are not operating in a free market as that term is generally understood. The battle for Chevron is not a bidding war between two privately owned companies, both responsible for maximizing shareholder value. CNOOC is 70 percent state-owned, the beneficiary of cheap government financing, and expected to act in support of the regime's geopolitical objectives. That makes a mockery of the Chinese authorities' warning to the Bush administration not to politicize the CNOOC takeover bid. China has decided to use its state resources to convert its major companies into important multinationals--part of an aggressive policy of projecting Chinese power on a global basis. If that's not political, nothing is.

The Chinese are corrupt, not stupid. They intend to use our commitment to free trade as a hammer to weaken us economically and militarily. China is not an open market to us. The driving force behind our presence in China is not low-cost labor. You can get low-cost labor in Eastern Europe, in India, in Mexico, in Korea. It is sales guys and CEOs drooling over the prospect of a billion new customers, and hoping that taking a bath on partnerships that never seem to go anywhere will help us crack that market.

The Chinese are quite adept at confining Westerners to a safe distance offshore, however. As much as they like our money, they covet our power and influence more, and are willing to use greenbacks we give them to procure both.