By many counts, the trade deal President Trump signed on Wednesday with China lacks heft. It doesn’t remove all the tariffs, it doesn’t impose any major penalties on intellectual property theft, and it punts completely on issues including China’s state subsidies to prop up its own companies in international markets.
Yet on one matter, the agreement could dramatically alter the U.S.-China relationship and the future of global democracy.
China isn’t any nation. It’s a high-tech superpower deeply embedded in the global economy. And as documented extensively by a variety of organizations including Freedom House and Human Rights Watch, China’s authoritarian government exploits economic ties and uses the technology it develops and acquires to control its own population and to extend its power abroad.
Some 63 countries and counting have bought Chinese-made artificial intelligence surveillance equipment. This technology has been deployed by the Chinese government to control the Uighurs through a sophisticated network of facial recognition cameras, GPS trackers, DNA checkpoints, and online-behavior monitoring on a 24-hour basis.
Outside of Xinjiang, 200 million cameras watch China’s population. In some schools, children wear GPS and facial-recognition-enabled uniforms designed to keep them in line. And beyond China’s borders, its companies sell tracking and monitoring set-ups to authoritarian police forces worldwide. With these purchases comes training on how to identify threats by studying the walking gait of an individual in a series of video camera frames, or through “public opinion guidance,” which uses artificial intelligence to monitor citizens’ speech. In short, this is the technological grounding for 21st century authoritarianism.
Unfortunately, China’s own actions make a return to the post-trade-war status quo unlikely. In addition to its high-tech-driven human rights abuses, Beijing is actively working to undermine democracies worldwide using social media disinformation campaigns in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as through state-funded traditional media beyond the Chinese-speaking world.
The new trade agreement will not resolve strains in the U.S.-China relationship — nor should it. This tension is grounded in the profound ideological differences between democracy and the Chinese Communist Party’s model of repression that it is disseminating around the world. If the United States treats this trade truce as a reset for the broader relationship, it would be tacitly accepting China’s abuses and its efforts to promote their spread.
Note EU-Digest: let us also not forget that Trump in order to distract public attention from his own troubles re: impeachment, is using every avenue at his disposal to shore-up his popularity and that includes this very nebulous trade agreement with the Chinese.
Read more: Opinion: Trump's trade deal with China ignores the big picture - Los Angeles Times
