Elon Musk brings the wrong message to Beijing
Tom Rogan
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In February, a Chinese People’s Liberation Army strategy paper disclosed plans to build 13,000 satellites in low Earth orbit. Its explicit mission: to “suppress Starlink” and, if desired, “destroy Starlink satellites that pass over China or other sensitive regions.”
If SpaceX (Starlink owner) CEO Elon Musk is concerned by that planning, he didn’t show it as he began high-level meetings in Beijing on Monday. On the contrary, the Chinese foreign ministry quoted Musk as claiming that he opposed “decoupling and disconnection” and regarded Sino-U.S. relations as “intertwined and inseparable.”
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Musk’s multiday visit comes less than a week after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) used a Twitter stream with Musk to announce his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. This visit is something DeSantis’s campaign team is unlikely to be happy about. It’s not hard to understand why.
Where the GOP is largely united in its concern over the Chinese Communist Party’s escalating threats to its neighbors and U.S. security, Musk’s smiling appearance with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang on Monday sent a different message. As Qin repeated China’s go-to narrative that the United States and China must refocus on “win-win cooperation,” Musk seems to have responded exactly as Beijing would have wished. Musk’s apparent description of an “intertwined and inseparable” U.S.-China relationship is a clear repudiation of the bipartisan U.S. pursuit of new guardrails in the U.S.-China relationship. The interest in those guardrails flows from various U.S. security concerns over supply chains, endemic Chinese intellectual property theft, and, most significantly of all, rapid improvements to the PLA. Those military developments come in anticipation of a war with the U.S. over Taiwan.
True, Tesla has major interests in China. That nation is critical to both Tesla’s manufacturing and sales bases. But Musk’s overt kowtowing to Beijing poses two problems. First, this rhetoric from America’s preeminent tech CEO undermines U.S. efforts to establish a more unified global effort in resisting China’s various threats. In that regard, Musk’s rhetoric puts him in the Franco-German China-appeasement camp versus the U.S.-Japan security-concern camp. Second, Musk’s rhetoric proffers an obvious contradiction for his political identity.
After all, via his purchase of Twitter and frequent commentaries related to censorship, Musk has presented himself as an archon for free speech. Though sometimes hypocritical in this regard, Musk has advanced Twitter’s provision of a more unrestrained public debate. That is praiseworthy. Nevertheless, the vigorous melee of viewpoints that defines Twitter is the antithesis of that which defines China’s Weibo social media platform. On Weibo, anything other than the mildest or most provincially focused critical speech is quickly banned by the Communist Party’s tens of thousands of censors.
That Twitter-Weibo contradiction is a metaphor for the central challenge to Sino-U.S. relations. Far from being “intertwined and inseparable,” this cuts to the inherent separability of the U.S. and China on matters of freedom. The contest of that separability will shape the 21st-century political order in favor of either free peoples or the Communist Party’s feudal autocracy. Playing down these distinctions in furtherance of Beijing’s propaganda narrative, Musk undermines everything he claims Twitter stands for. Indeed, Musk’s go-for-broke innovation mentality could hardly be more different from Xi Jinping’s go-broke-to-maintain-control innovation mentality.
This Sino-American divergence is a deadly serious one.
On Monday, Musk tweeted a Memorial Day homage to “those who died for freedom.” Fine words. But his tweet may end up ringing very hollow if, as is more likely than not, thousands of American sailors die in and around the Taiwan Strait in the coming years.