A former U.S. general is sounding the alarm on the ties that bind China’s communist regime to the levers of American power.
Retired U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, is seeking to undermine and ultimately displace the United States.
To accomplish that, he said, the regime needed to remain coupled to the United States so that it could buy or steal the American technologies required to gain a military advantage over the United States. As such, he said, the United States would need to wholly decouple strategic industrial sectors from the Chinese economy.
“The only thing that will help us in the conflict with China is complete removal of the CCP from our society,” Spalding, who is also an Epoch Times contributor, said.
US Must ‘Fully Decouple’ from China
Because the CCP adheres to a doctrine of unrestricted warfare in which it seeks to militarily defeat the United States through non-military means, Spalding said, the United States would need to sever ties with China in areas of important research, technology, and talent related to critical and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing.Spalding acknowledged that the Biden administration had made several efforts to curb the flow of American technologies to the CCP. The CHIPS Act, a possible governmental ban on TikTok, and efforts to curb the flow of semiconductor exports to China were all good starts, he said.
Ultimately, however, they would not be enough to prevent China from defeating the United States and usurping its position as the world leader, Spalding said.
“We need to change the way we do business in a big way,” Spalding said. “These small efforts are good news, but the CCP’s scope and scale across all elements of a society are overwhelming for any federal agency.”
To that end, Spalding said that the Biden administration should pursue a path similar to that laid out by Robert Lighthizer, who served as U.S. trade representative during the Trump administration.
Strategic decoupling in this instance would involve systematically imposing severe tariffs on China, increasing controls to limit the types of technology that could be exported to China, and limiting the amount of investment of U.S. corporations into China and of Chinese corporations into U.S. industries.
“It has become clear that China is not a friend or a partner in development, but rather an adversary bent on world dominance,” Lighthizer wrote.
“The purpose of strategic decoupling would be to benefit America, not to punish China or to hold it back.”
Only through a total breakup of CCP and U.S. technological sectors, Spalding said, could the regime’s military ascent be curbed and its mission of destabilizing the United States be thwarted.
Because the CCP is engaged in a systematic attempt to undermine and displace the United States, Spalding said, and because China’s ready access to advanced American research is fueling the effort, rooting out the tendrils of the regime everywhere they are found is necessary.
“The CCP understood they needed the West to advance, and they are still taking advantage of that,” Spalding said. “Thus, the only option is for us to completely decouple and prevent our citizens from engaging with China.”
“The only way is to fully decouple. If we do not, then the CCP will continue to have access to our technology, talent, and capital.”
