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Opinion

U.S. must learn to pressure China with the focused precision of a fracking operation

Adopting geophysicists' seismic approach, monitoring and measuring ideological reverberations that domestic and international events "detonate" within the CCP, allows observers to map fracture lines separating various factions within the communist party.

Some people fear China and fit the country into a framework of a Sisyphean challenge for the United States. The U.S. is Sisyphus, the mythological Greek figure condemned to push a giant boulder up a hill for eternity, only to have it roll back down as soon as it gets to the top. China is the boulder. And the hill is the U.S. goal of convincing China to respect — indeed, support — rules of law and the institutions that apply those laws equally, without discrimination.

As the U.S. seeks to implement a new national security strategy and promote peace and prosperity broadly, we must break the myth's defeatist hold. To do so, it helps to identify the rock not as China but more precisely as the Chinese Communist Party. Even more specifically, it helps to recognize the rock as a conglomerate and not as the indivisible structure that the party's General Secretary Xi Jinping portrays.

It is not China, but the party that co-opts governmental authority to sentence activists for "subverting state power" and "speaking for democracy," to belch pollution and rip apart reefs in the South China Sea. It is the party that seeks to uproot the multilateral rules and norms that incubated its own rise, preserved peace, and promoted prosperity globally for seven decades. These very rules and norms represent core U.S. values, that not only protect the lives, liberties, properties and happiness of freedom loving people everywhere, but also incline the world away from war and toward peace.

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But back to Sisyphus, the rock and the hill.

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Sisyphus's hill, the U.S. goal, should remain convincing China to respect international rule of law. The U.S. should not change the hill, but it can break the boulder into smaller, more manageable pieces. Anyone with a background in mining, road building or oil drilling can appreciate the value of mapping deeply buried fissures and using that mapping to precisely apply pressure to make beneficial fractures. Some may dismiss the analogy, but we have entered a 21st century war of philosophies and must rely on all our resources to protect our freedoms-based ways of living.

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We must avoid the mistake of viewing the Chinese Communist Party as a unified and unitary entity. Adopting geophysicists' seismic approach, monitoring and measuring ideological reverberations that domestic and international events "detonate" within the party allows observers to map fracture lines separating various factions within the communist party. Some of those factions threaten domestic and international norms more dangerously than others. Once mapped, geopolitical horizontal drilling can fastidiously focus fracturing, or fracking, pressure exactly where needed to bust up the cabal within the party that seeks to suppress Chinese citizens at home and steal intellectual property abroad.

This approach works commercially and will work geopolitically. Since the mid 1990s, Tang Energy Group followed similar methodologies to yield preferred responses from within party-controlled Aviation Industry Corporation of China (the very same corporate arm of the party that uses stolen U.S. technology to build stealth airplanes and unmanned aerial vehicles). Tang identified and rewarded capable people within its joint venture with AVIC. That company, HT Blade, started from nothing and became the second largest wind blade manufacturer in the world. Tang used the geophysicists' approach to gather insights and, for a time, to stave off the asset-shifting, business-taking, Chinese Communist Party-directed efforts of AVIC officers.

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Similarly, charting intraparty fractures creates operational and diplomatic opportunities that the U.S. can use to break down toxic, metastatic communist party structures and limit the reach of the party's authoritarian faction, which both oppresses the Chinese people and exports fear, injustice and oppression.

The Chinese Communist Party leader, General Secretary Xi Jinping, feeds and rides that authoritarian faction's current ascendance. This group uses new technologies, which expand the reach and reduce the costs of authoritarianism, to intimidate Chinese citizens domestically, and the faction wields state monopolies to diminish free trade globally. Just like breaking Sisyphus's boulder into smaller pieces, focusing pressure to isolate this faction reduces the U.S. workload to achieve its goals.

This strategy is likely to succeed because the general secretary's perch of political power is precarious since he has broken with his ideological predecessors' pragmatic economic-political philosophy. Two former general secretaries separate Xi from Chairman Deng Xiaoping, who initiated China's economic renaissance by allowing individuals to keep (some of) the fruits of their labors.

Deng's policies catalyzed decades of improving economic conditions for all Chinese citizens. What Deng began, former Premier Zhu Rongji consolidated with China's acceptance into the World Trade Organization. Apply pressure precisely on the Chinese Communist Party authoritarian faction and watch the U.S. run Xi's pebble up the hill and leave it there.

Patrick Jenevein is chief executive of Tang Energy in Dallas. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News. Email: president@tangenergy.com

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