Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo attended President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration yesterday. His name was the first atop China’s “list of 28 sanctioned Americans” after his tenure in former US president Donald Trump’s administration ended on Jan. 20, 2021. Since then, Pompeo has visited Taiwan three times, and his memoir Never Give An Inch has been published in Taiwan, showing how little China’s “sanctions” mean.
Pompeo, who views China’s sanctions as an honor, said that their purpose was, in part, to send a warning to US President Joe Biden that if he continued Trump’s policies, Beijing would inform the large firms on Wall Street that their days of reaping money from China would be over.
For more than three years, the Biden administration has stuck with the Trump administration’s China trade policies, preserving several hundreds of billions of dollars in punitive tariffs on Chinese goods.
Last week, the Biden administration added a 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles. His administration is preparing to list several Chinese enterprises on a sanctions blacklist, far exceeding the Trump administration. Chinese authorities’ wishful thinking has completely fallen apart.
In December 2022, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs followed its sanctioning of Pompeo by adding his former principal China planning and policy adviser Miles Yu (余茂春), a former On Taiwan columnist for this paper, onto its sanction list.
Prior to this, Yu’s distant relatives in China’s Anhui Province convened a speaking event to “condemn the Chinese traitor Yu Mao-chun [Miles Yu].” They wanted to “remove him from the family registry and erase him from the family tree.” Additionally, at Yu’s junior-high school, Chongqing Yongchuan Middle School, the names of high-scoring students in the high-school entrance exams are carved onto a stone plaque, including Yu’s. However, someone has scraped his name from the stone marker.
Such absurd antics imitating the China’s Cultural Revolution purges have no substantial effect on Yu or his family. He has no direct blood relatives in Anhui Province and does not have assets there. He had never been on an official visit to China, nor deemed it safe to return anyway. Yu said his sanctioning was “a badge of honor,” adding that China’s sanctions are meaningless, vague and do not compare to the concrete reasoning behind US sanctions.
After the implementation of Hong Kong’s National Security Law in 2020, the US Department of the Treasury in August of that year sanctioned then-Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) and other officials in her administration. This led to banks being unwilling to provide her with banking services. As a result, she was unable to use a credit card. No bank would open an account in her name, and the Hong Kong government had to pay her salary in cash.
Her family had no choice but to save large quantities of cash. Even China’s state-run banks were too afraid to give her a lifeline, afraid that they would be kicked out of the SWIFT international banking transaction clearing house. Neither were they willing to accept savings deposits from her. Even Lam’s son, who was a doctoral candidate at Harvard, had to return to Hong Kong and give up his post-doctoral research plans at Stanford University. US sanctions brought massive inconveniences to the Lam household.
China lobs worthless sanctions at outsiders, but these unexpectedly knock the legs out from under Beijing, showing how utterly ineffective it is. All it can do is sit back in embarrassment from its self-flattery.
Chen Yung-chang is a company manager.
Translated by Tim Smith
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