Oligarchs and Chinese Spies: Who’s the Bigger Threat to Americans?

The Chinese government is not our friend, nor the friend of the Chinese people, nor the friend of democratic values. It practices and espouses a nationalist capitalist Leninism that under Xi Jinping has evolved into a nationalist capitalist neo-Stalinism, with increasing one-man rule, intolerance of any failure to exalt Xi sufficiently, and the imposition of nationwide high-tech Orwellian surveillance. It has extended that surveillance to the Chinese diaspora, with a global network of underground informers and the occasional thug who threaten Xi’s critics in distant lands.

More conventionally, it has employed spies to do what spies customarily do. The Mata Hari ploy that ensnared Nvidia’s now former CEO Jensen Huang was a time-honored tactic that goes back to the beginnings of statecraft. It may well have resulted in the transportation of the most advanced AI chips to China (which would violate our government’s prohibition of this) through the intermediation of his spy-girlfriend’s Singapore-based company. This could bolster China’s AI capacity, which under certain conditions could lead to a version of a fraught U.S.-China standoff reminiscent of the nuclear standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Short of an AI version of actual mutually assured destruction, however, I’d argue that it’s our tech CEOs, rather than any Chinese spies, who’ve wrought the most havoc on the American people. My colleague Ryan Cooper has documented the specter of looming financial disaster if the handful of tech behemoths that currently constitute almost the entire growth sector of our economy go flooey due to the indiscretions or idiocies of their oligarch owners and CEOs. But even if our economy weathers the current Nvidia panic, those oligarchs have already become the enemies of America’s values, spirit, life and limb.

Has anyone worked more assiduously to hold down the income of his workers than Jeff Bezos, who contracts out Amazon’s delivery workers, who shutters warehouses where workers vote to go union, and refuses to bargain with those workers in the minuscule number of warehouses he’s kept open despite a pro-union vote? Has anyone subjected more children to online addiction than Mark Zuckerberg, despite years of efforts to try to get him to reform the online universe of which he controls a major share? Has anyone scorned the value and values of democracy more than Peter Thiel, who also now lectures weekly to Christian nationalists about the Antichrist, who, he says, must be a small-d democrat and no fan of Silicon Valley? Has anyone spent more money to oppose the kind of progressive taxation needed to keep hospitals open, and to make college and child care and health care affordable, than Google’s Sergey Brin? Has anyone done more to promote cryptocurrency and pour millions into campaigns to defeat the politicians who want to preserve and enhance the financial safeguards Americans plainly need than Marc Andreessen? And going back 45 years to our current oligarchs’ forebears, did anyone do more to destroy American manufacturing, have it relocate to China because its workers came cheap, and thereby help turn China into the power it is today, than General Electric’s Jack Welch, and all his peers on Wall Street and in C-suites?

With those guys reshaping our economy and society—spearheading the upward redistribution of wealth and income that has put so much of education, housing, and medical, child, and senior care beyond the capacity of Americans to afford them—who’s the greater threat to the lives that Americans lead? Our own oligarchs or China’s undercover (or under-the-covers) infiltrators? I’ll leave that up to you.