Former Ambassador to China, Russia Talks EV Supply Chain, Russia-China Links
Jon Huntsman Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to China and Russia, told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that the current administration has not found a strategy on how to deal with China's economic abuses. He said intellectual property theft has grown to a trillion-dollar problem, and there's a need to address the distortions caused by Chinese industrial subsidies and state-owned enterprises. "If we don't define that agenda, nobody else will," Huntsman said.
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At the Chamber's Global Forum -- Competition in the Global Marketplace May 10, the session moderator asked Huntsman if China's refusal to condemn the invasion of Ukraine should change the commercial relationship with China. He responded that if it were revealed that China's president was involved in the planning of the war, "there would be a serious downward spiral." But, he said, despite the talk of a relationship without limits, even before the sanctions, Chinese banks didn't do much business with Russian firms or oligarchs. "Why? Because they don't trust their business practices," he said. And, he said, most businesses in China "have way more to gain with maintaining or gaining a healthy relationship with Western firms" than they do supplying Russia.
Huntsman is now vice chair of policy at the Ford Motor Company, and he said Ford is trying to catch up to China and surpass it in the electric vehicle space. He said that bringing more semiconductor fabrication to the U.S. is critical, but so is sourcing lithium or nickel from North America, either the U.S. or Canada. If you don't reopen mines here, he said, you have to get these metals from China, which he called "self-defeating."
"We can compete, and we can win, but it’s going to have to be a joint effort with the government," he said, and suggested that the government needs to change its approach to regulating mining.