Gordon Chang: Seize China's U.S. Treasury Holdings in Conjunction with Allies

America should coordinate with allies to seize China’s holdings of U.S. Treasury and other state treasuries’ obligations as compensation for the one-party state’s negligence regarding the coronavirus outbreak, said Gordon Chang, Daily Beast columnist and author of The Great U.S.-China Tech War.

“I think the United States should seize China’s holdings of U.S. treasuries,” said Chang on Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily in an interview with host Alex Marlow.

“We should do this in conjunction with the issuers of the other major occurrences,” added Chang, specifying Canada, the U.K., Switzerland, and Japan. “If we act alone, China is going to say that we repudiated our debt. We’re going to take a reputational hit, which is going to be a big one. Also, they’re going to say that we are an irresponsible member of the global financial system, and that the [U.S.] dollar shouldn’t be the reserve currency of the world.”

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Chang continued, “If we act with our allies and friends — the issuers of these other currencies — we can take away that argument from China. We can never take enough money from China to compensate us. We’ve lost so many people. We will lose so many people. Even just if you looked at the the financial damages, China doesn’t have enough assets in the world to compensate the United States, much less other countries. Nonetheless, we’ve got to deter bad actors including China from doing what they did in spreading this disease.”

Chang added, “All we have to do is [have] the Treasury Department and the President of the United States say, ‘We’re not paying you back. We’re confiscating your holdings of treasuries.’”

Washington’s seizure of China’s U.S. Treasury holdings would be coordinated with parallel measures from in Ottawa, London, Brussels, Bern, and Tokyo, according to Chang’s proposal.

Marlow concurred, “We need to have some sort of level of of punishment or retribution. … The word that comes to mind for me is reparations.”

China’s initial denials of the coronavirus’ human-to-human transmissibility caused delayed global reaction to the viral outbreak, Chang remarked.

“What the media has done in the United States is adopt China’s narratives without fully explaining them,” stated Chang. “That is a dereliction of their duty.”

Chang maintained his call for decoupling the U.S. economy from China.

“I think we can cut our relations [with China] not in decades, but in months, especially if President Trump is reelected,” Chang said. “Of all the people who are running, [Donald Trump] is the one who is the most skeptical of China. He’s the one who’s actually changed America’s China policy and broken the engagement approach of the last four decades.”