U.S. President Joe Biden (R) and CCP leader Xi Jinping (L) meet on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Nusa Dua on the Indonesian resort island of Bali on Nov. 14, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
The dirty secret of Silicon Valley’s trillions in wealth creation is that much of it has been built on Chinese slave labor. I bring that up because President Joe Biden may be meeting Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) starting Nov. 12. According to the San Francisco Standard, whether Mr. Xi attends is the biggest question: “The Chinese leader has been coy about whether he’s attending.”
The summit is further complicated because APEC’s 21 members include Hong Kong, now a captive nation (to use a Cold War term) of communist China; Taiwan, which China is threatening to invade and make a captive nation; and Russia, against which Mr. Biden is fighting a proxy war through Ukraine.
If Mr. Xi does show up, the Secret Service will have a difficult time protecting him and Mr. Biden not just from potential motivated assailants, but also from the common criminals on the streets of San Francisco, a once beautiful and charming city that has descended into chaos under the rule of Mr. Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom. The Beast, Mr. Biden’s limousine, might get broken into and its communications equipment stolen.
As to the gleaming tech companies of San Francisco and Silicon Valley to the south, their trillions in market capitalization are built not on the free market but on offshoring of manufacturing to China and its slave-labor system. Your iPhone or Android (Google) device probably is made in China.
The two systems have been the only ones available until recently. A third finally came last month. Oops! It’s from China, too. The New York Times reported, “The release of a homegrown Chinese smartphone during a visit by the Biden official in charge of regulating such technology shows the U.S.-China tech conflict is alive and well.”
As The Epoch Times reported in 2021: “The chairmen of a top U.S. congressional body on June 8 urged Apple CEO Tim Cook to divest itself from Chinese suppliers implicated in forced labor involving Uyghur Muslims.
“The call came after recent investigations found that several Apple suppliers had ties to suspected forced labor of Uyghurs in the far western region of Xinjiang. Apple has maintained that it has found no evidence of forced labor in its supply chains in China or elsewhere.
“‘The mounting evidence is beyond troubling,’ said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Rep. James P. McGovern (D-Mass.), chair and co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, in a statement. ‘Despite persistent assurances from Apple that their supply chains were free of forced labor, we now have evidence that it is tainted.’”
Not a Free Market
We’re supposed to be OK with massive imports from China because there’s a global “free market.” I’m all for free trade, including low tariffs. But slave labor isn’t “free trade.” Aren’t Americans continually lectured about the legacy of slavery here, which ended 158 years ago? What about the slavery going on now, and its benefit to the tech billionaires?
Apple originally built its legendary first Macintosh starting in 1984 in Fremont, California. According to The Next Web: “Steve Jobs was personally involved in the development of the facility, ensuring that when it opened it was capable of producing a Macintosh every 27 seconds. Apple later moved Macintosh production to another site but the factory continued to output laser printer and desktop software before closing in September 1992.”
Jobs With Mac
Steve Jobs and a Macintosh computer, January 1984, by Bernard Gotfryd. The image on the computer screen is 髪梳ける女 (A Woman Combing Her Hair), by Hashiguchi Goyo (d. 1921). (Public Domain)
Directed by Ridley Scott, the original TV ad for the Mac aired during the 1984 Super Bowl and still is considered one of the best TV ads ever produced. Playing in the year of the setting of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the ad portrayed little Apple and its Mac fighting against Big Brother IBM, at the time the world’s biggest and most dominant computer company. IBM in 1981 had introduced its PC to obliterate Apple’s earlier product, the Apple II.
Ironically, Apple itself has become Big Brother, the biggest and most valuable tech company in the world. Here are the top five global market capitalizations:
Apple: $2.8 trillion
Microsoft: $2.5 trillion
Saudi Aramco: $2.2 trillion
Alphabet/Google: $1.8 trillion
Amazon: $1.4 trillion
Except for Saudi Aramco, an oil company, the top companies all are U.S. high-tech firms heavily dependent on Chinese products. And all these companies are, of course, engaged in heavy censorship of thoughts believed unacceptable by the United States’ regnant leftist ideologues.
In China, Apple especially censors its products to appease the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictatorship. Even the liberal New York Times reported on this in a 2021 report: “Over two decades, Apple built the world’s most valuable company on top of China. It now assembles nearly all of its products in the country and generates a fifth of its sales there. In turn, the Chinese government has pressured Apple executives to make compromises that flout the values they espouse.
If Apple has turned into the Big Brother it once attacked, then for Apple itself, the CCP is the Biggest Brother.
Chip Wars
The United States’ lead in the tech field depends mainly on software companies, as listed above. Amazon sells actual, physical products, but its real asset is its online selling portal, Amazon.com. Apple’s software depends on the best chips from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company being sent to China for assembly in iPhones.
Recently the Biden administration imposed restrictions on Chinese access to the top U.S. chips and provided subsidies to U.S. companies from the CHIPS and Science Act. On China’s response, Foreign Affairs reported in an Oct. 11 article: “Not only is the Chinese government doubling down on cutting-edge processors, it is also becoming more competitive in legacy chip manufacturing and chip design, threatening to take advantage of U.S. dependencies on Chinese semiconductors. Given China’s response to U.S. restrictions, it is increasingly likely that Washington will have to wage the chip war on two different fronts: expanding export restrictions for leading-edge chip production while simultaneously addressing China’s growing advantage in legacy semiconductor manufacturing and chip design.”
That’s going to be difficult because, as I reported in The Epoch Times a month ago, California’s dumbed-down school system isn’t producing enough graduates in STEM: science, technology, engineering, and math. The United States is graduating 237,000 engineers a year, to China’s 1.3 million—5.5 times as many.
Conclusion: Wake Up Call?
I’m wondering what is going to wake up Americans to what’s really going on. Two years ago this month in The Epoch Times, I reported on TSMC’s giant new chip fabrication plant in Phoenix. But last week, the Financial Times reported in an article headlined “TSMC in the US: Can Taiwan’s Chip Giant Overcome a Culture Clash?”:
“[The past two years] have been rough, threatening the project’s timeline. The Taiwanese company has struggled with the American approach to construction and labor, says Dylan Patel, chief analyst at SemiAnalysis, a California-based chip industry research and consulting firm. ‘TSMC didn’t quite get the culture.’”
In July, TSMC Chair Mark Lieu “told investors that the date for starting production would be pushed back from next year to 2025.”
What a change from the post-World War II period, when my parents and their generation rebuilt a war-devastated world, including Japan, Germany, and Taiwan. Such legends as W. Edwards Deming brought to everyone the latest scientific manufacturing techniques.
Whether or not Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi actually meet in San Francisco, Americans, and especially Californians, need to wake from their slumbers, ditch such lunacy as critical race theory in the schools for vastly expanded STEM training, and restore a purely merit-based system in all areas of the economy.
The alternative is vassal status to Mr. Xi and his successors.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
John Seiler is a veteran California opinion writer. Mr. Seiler has written editorials for The Orange County Register for almost 30 years. He is a U.S. Army veteran and former press secretary for California state Sen. John Moorlach. He blogs at JohnSeiler.Substack.com and his email is [email protected]
