After a long, bloody revolutionary war, the People's Republic of China was established in the autumn of 1949.
Although it was at the time the most populous nation in the world, the United States did not officially recognize its existence until 1972, when a most unlikely person, communist hardliner Richard Nixon, took the realistic step.
The relationship since then has been an up-and-down one tied to domestic politics in both countries. And as strategic adversaries do, both countries have spied on the other for advantage.
China, especially, has violated legal norms by stealing both industrial methods and intellectual properties. Partial reforms are negotiated, but then never fully implemented, and the U.S. moves on.
China or its agents are insidiously successful in infiltrating U.S. systems. It is routinely caught hacking into U.S. government agencies and American infrastructure systems, presumably to plan sabotage in the event of open hostilities. At one point during the Obama reign of error, Chinese agents had months-long undetected access to confidential government personnel files involving some 20 million people, information that would be key, for instance, to recruiting spies.
And perhaps you recall the giant Chinese balloon carrying intelligence-gathering pods the size of two school buses that Joe Biden permitted to float low over the entire country for an entire week while radioing its findings back to Beijing via satellite.
Nonetheless, the two countries have established an immense trading relationship, one of the largest in the world. That relationship, however, has been heavily in favor of China. President Donald Trump has made a major issue out of at least partially correcting the trade imbalance by forcing U.S. firms to bring production back stateside or to other more hospitable Asian countries with cheap labor.
The Trump administration has extended a tariff deadline to continue negotiations with Chinese authorities.
As part of those talks, the administration recently approved resumption of exports by two major U.S. tech giants of AI computer chips to China. Trump wisely wants U.S. tech to dominate the global AI computer world.
The export approval is a highly unusual one, however. The two tech giants — Nvidia and AMD — have both agreed to pay the U.S. Treasury 15 percent of total AI chip sales to China in return for the approval. In effect, buying a government export license.
This is a typically successful high-value Trump deal that will produce multiple billions of dollars in U.S. government revenues.
China has vowed to take over the island nation of Taiwan, currently the world's top-producing computer chip maker, which likely would involve armed conflict with U.S. forces.
The newly-approved chip export deal will also provide China's industry and military with advanced computer chips. Despite billions in new money, do we really want to be providing a likely military adversary and our most aggressive strategic competitor with this advanced technology that could then be used against us?
That is the subject of concern and debate in this week's audio commentary, which you can access here:
The most recent Sunday column examined how, amid so many other reforms and new policies, Donald Trump is advancing the political future of the Republican Party at the state level.
The most recent audio commentary started out as a commentary on the sale of the iconic American breakfast cereal maker Kellogg's to an Italian conglomerate for more than $3 billion.
But then accidentally became an eye-opening account of how much of U.S. business control is now owned by foreign interests.
