Rogue Nation

We must stop China from gaining control of the Internet
By Newt Gingrich

What will it be like if the Internet that America invented and designed is replaced in the next technological cycle by one that is controlled, developed, implemented, and managed by the Chinese?
This is a real possibility we must confront right now.
The danger of America giving up and allowing the Chinese to win was driven home by a senior United States government official this week. 

The Washington Post published a story headlined: “U.S. officials planning for a future in which Huawei has a major share of 5G global networks.”
The newspaper quoted Sue Gordon, the principal deputy director of national intelligence saying: “We are going to have to figure out a way in a 5G world that we’re able to manage the risks in a diverse network that includes technology that we can’t trust.” 

She added, “We’re just going to have to figure that out.”
I read this while I was having highly productive talks about China, 5G, and Huawei in the Netherlands in a series of conversations arranged by U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
In six meetings, I communicated what I have been told is the absolute position of the president, the vice president, the national security adviser and the secretary of defense. 

Furthermore, I have been told that the head of the National Security Agency and the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency have both been very clear that Huawei is an enormous national security threat.

A Chinese Internet should be totally unacceptable to everyone who believes in freedom.

I have been focusing on this growing challenge for months, and I devoted two episodes of my “Newt’s World” podcast to 5G, referring to it as the 4th Industrial Revolution.
The Trump administration position has been that 5G is extraordinarily important and so powerful that Huawei and China cannot be trusted to run it. 

Administration officials have gone all over the planet urging countries to block Huawei technology in their networks because it poses a national security risk.
I was in the Netherlands urging the Dutch to block Huawei and develop a European alternative with Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and advanced secure 5G technology from the United States.
So while I was advocating the rejection of Huawei, The Washington Post reported an administration official suggesting that we have to learn to live with it.
In all fairness, the story was simply reporting the confusion, incompetence and hostility that has characterized the Defense Department bureaucracy’s inability to act effectively against the Chinese threat.
For months, President Trump and his senior national security team have been clear that America must be proactive and aggressive in meeting and quickly overmatching the Chinese challenge.
Meanwhile, for months, senior bureaucrats at the Defense Department have been blocking any effective response.
The large, older telecommunications companies have been encouraging the bureaucrats to take a slow-motion, risk-averse, “don’t worry about Huawei” approach. 

They have also been deliberately distorting the ideas of reformers and misrepresenting a proposal for a wholesale network as a plan for government-run nationalization of the American 5G network.
However, the reformers – the people who are most committed to defeating Huawei – are totally committed to a free market system funded by private capital and implemented by private companies.
Those seriously analyzing the Huawei threat believe that only a wholesale approach – allowing every company to share spectrum in a competitive environment – is capable of dropping prices enough to undercut the Huawei strategy of buying business through Chinese government-subsidized special deals.
I want to be crystal clear: The stakes are enormous. 

It represents the greatest American technological failure since the Soviets launched Sputnik.
I know a great many people are thinking, “What’s the big deal? Who cares if China builds out the global Internet through Huawei’s 5G network?”
The answer is: A Chinese Internet should be totally unacceptable to everyone who believes in freedom.
As I said in the Netherlands: China is a Leninist totalitarian state. 

The Chinese government has put at least 1 million Muslim Uighurs in concentration camps. 

It regularly locks up Catholic priests and bishops. 

It has outlawed the Falun Gong and persecutes them.
China recently put the most popular movie star in the nation (and therefore the world) under “residential surveillance,” or house arrest, for months without trial. 

It is developing and implementing a “social credit” system which will track the private behavior of 1.4 billion people and judge them without trial.
Xi Jinping is chairman of the Central Military Commission, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and president of the People’s Republic of China, in that order.
His military commission post is most important because the People’s Liberation Army is first and foremost an extension of the Communist Party – not the government.
Xi’s No. 1 duty is to the nearly 90 million members of the Chinese Communist Party (by contrast, Donald Trump received 63 million votes to become president).
In excerpts from a 2013 speech that were just released this week, Xi made the case for the life and death struggle between Chinese Communism and the West.
“Our party has always adhered to the lofty ideals of communism,” Xi said. 

“Communists, especially leading cadres, should be staunch believers and faithful practitioners of the lofty ideals of communism and the common ideals of socialism with Chinese characteristics. The belief in Marxism, socialism, and communism is the political soul of the communists and the spiritual prop of the communists to withstand any test. The party constitution clearly stipulates that the highest ideal and ultimate goal of the party is to realize communism.”
In a nod toward Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Xi told the Communist Party Central Committee: “Facts have repeatedly told us that Marx and Engels' analysis of the basic contradictions in capitalist society is not out of date, nor is their historical materialism view that capitalism must die out and socialism must win. This is an irreversible general trend in social and historical development, but the road is tortuous.”
“The final demise of capitalism and the final victory of socialism must be a long historical process,” Xi added. 

“We should have a deep understanding of the self-regulation ability of capitalist society, fully estimate the objective reality of the long-term dominance of Western developed countries in economic, scientific, technological and military aspects, and earnestly prepare for the long-term cooperation and struggle between the two social systems.”
Xi concluded the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party must “continuously build socialism with superiority over capitalism, and continuously lay a more solid foundation for us to win initiative, advantage and future.”
Huawei is a brilliant example of long-term planning and a decisive effort to “win initiative, advantage and future.”
If the United States does not get its act together, we should expect to suffer a strategic defeat in the emergence of a Chinese-controlled Internet that may define the next half century.
Vice President Mike Pence’s speech to the National Space Council last week captured the right sense of urgency and willingness to change organizations and innovate despite the bureaucracy.
The 5G challenge is an even more immediate crisis than securing our leadership in space – and American leadership in space is critical to our ultimate survival as a nation.
We need the Trump-Pence team to drive into the bureaucracy the Churchillian motto of “action this day.”
Bureaucrats who don’t take beating Huawei seriously should be replaced until we find a team capable of winning for America and for freedom.

Two Chinas Policy

Bob Dole Worked Behind the Scenes on Trump-Taiwan Call
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and ERIC LIPTON

Former Senator Bob Dole, shown in November 2015, has been working as a lobbyist with the Washington law firm Alston & Bird. 

WASHINGTON — Former Senator Bob Dole, acting as a foreign agent for the government of Taiwan, worked behind the scenes over the past six months to establish high-level contact between Taiwanese officials and President Donald J. Trump’s staff, an outreach effort that culminated last week in an unorthodox telephone call between Mr. Trump and Taiwan’s president.
Mr. Dole, a lobbyist with the Washington law firm Alston & Bird, coordinated with Mr. Trump’s campaign and the transition team to set up a series of meetings between Mr. Trump’s advisers and officials in Taiwan, according to disclosure documents filed last week with the Justice Department. Mr. Dole also assisted in successful efforts by Taiwan to include language favorable to it in the Republican Party platform, according to the documents.
Mr. Dole’s firm received $140,000 from May to October for the work, the forms said.
The disclosures suggest that President Trump’s decision to take a call from the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, was less a ham-handed diplomatic move and more the result of a well-orchestrated plan by Taiwan to use the election of a new president to deepen its relationship with the United States — with an assist from a seasoned lobbyist well versed in the machinery of Washington.
“They’re very optimistic,” Mr. Dole said of the Taiwanese in an interview on Tuesday. 

“They see a new president, a Republican, and they’d like to develop a closer relationship.”

The United States’ One China policy is nearly four decades old, Mr. Dole said, referring to the policy established in 1979 that denies Taiwan official diplomatic recognition but maintains close contacts, promoting Taiwan’s democracy and selling it advanced military equipment.

The phone call between Mr. Trump and Ms. Tsai was a striking break from nearly four decades of diplomatic practice and threatened to precipitate a major rift with China, which admonished Mr. Trump in a front-page editorial in the overseas edition of People’s Daily.
The disclosure documents were submitted before the call took place and made no mention of it. 

But Mr. Dole, 93, a former Senate majority leader from Kansas, said he had worked with transition officials to facilitate the conversation.
“It’s fair to say that we had some influence,” he said. 

“When you represent a client and they make requests, you’re supposed to respond.”
Officials on Mr. Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment.
The documents suggest that Mr. Dole helped the government of Taiwan establish early access to Mr. Trump’s inner circle during the campaign, when Mr. Dole worked to involve Mr. Trump’s aides in a United States delegation to Taiwan and to facilitate a Taiwanese delegation to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July.
The effort has continued in the weeks since the election, with Mr. Dole on Tuesday saying he was trying to fulfill a request from a special envoy from Taiwan who was visiting Washington to see Reince Priebus, tapped by Mr. Trump to be White House chief of staff, and Newt Gingrich, who is close to the president. (The Priebus meeting, Mr. Dole said, would most likely have to wait until Mr. Trump is inaugurated.)
Mr. Dole, the only former Republican presidential nominee to endorse Mr. Trump, arranged a meeting between Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, whom Mr. Trump has chosen to be his attorney general, and Stanley Kao, Taiwan’s envoy to the United States, and convened a meeting between Taiwanese officials and Mr. Trump’s transition team, the documents say.
Mr. Dole, who said he first took an interest in Taiwan as a senator when Congress was considering the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act that established the current policy, has lobbied for the Taiwanese government for nearly two decades. 

In a letter in January, Mr. Dole laid out the terms of his agreement to represent the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States, Taiwan’s unofficial embassy, including a $25,000 monthly retainer.
That letter and the document detailing Mr. Dole’s work for the Taiwanese were filed at the Justice Department, which requires foreign agents to register and detail their efforts at influencing the United States government.
Among his duties, the letter said, were helping Taiwan achieve its “military goals” and obtain membership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-nation trade deal that Mr. Trump has promised to withdraw from. 

Mr. Dole was also to arrange for Taiwanese officials to meet with members of Congress from both parties and arrange access to Republican presidential contenders and to the party’s national convention.
The government of Taiwan has retained a powerful bipartisan constellation of former members of Congress to promote its interests in Washington. 

Richard A. Gephardt, a Missouri Democrat and former House majority leader, also signed a $25,000-a-month contract to represent the Taipei office this year, as did Thomas A. Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, a former Senate majority leader, in 2015.
Mr. Trump’s transition team has sent mixed messages about the call with Ms. Tsai, whether it was meant as a mere gesture of good will or a provocation aimed at drawing Taiwan closer to the United States as a way of challenging China, which considers Taiwan a breakaway province.
Vice President Mike Pence suggested in the days after the call that Mr. Trump had merely been affording a courtesy to another “democratically elected leader.” 

But in a series of Twitter posts on Sunday, Mr. Trump suggested a more confrontational motive, criticizing China for unfair trade practices and aggressive military moves.
“Did China ask us if it was OK” to take such actions, Mr. Trump asked rhetorically, appearing to counter suggestions that the United States must ask Beijing’s permission to communicate with Taiwan.
Several senior advisers to Mr. Trump have long advocated stronger United States support for Taiwan, arguing that it would help to counterbalance Beijing’s influence. 

Alexander Grey and Peter Navarro, Trump transition advisers, wrote an article last month in Foreign Policy branding the Obama administration’s treatment of Taiwan “egregious.”
Over the weekend, Taiwan’s official Central News Agency said that Edward J. Feulner, a member of Mr. Trump’s transition team and the former president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that supports stronger ties with Taiwan, had played a crucial role in bringing about the call with Mr. Trump. 

Mr. Feulner met with Ms. Tsai in Taiwan in October.
Even before the phone call, Taiwan had succeeded in accomplishing important goals with Mr. Trump’s team. 

At their convention in Cleveland in July, Republicans adopted a platform that for the first time enshrined the “six assurances” to Taiwan made by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, including that the United States would not set a date for ending arms sales to the Taiwanese.