Former Governor and U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman said the Obama Administration lacks a "go-to" individual to address Chinese cyber attacks Tuesday on Fox Business:
ADAM SHAPIRO: Thank you. Very quickly. Is the administration by sending the secretary of the treasury - let's bring up issue of cyber attacks. Is he the right person to be confronting the new president on that issue?
JON HUNTSMAN: Well the issue is the right one. It needs to be teed up at the highest possible levels. One of the problems this administration has fundamentally is they lack a go-to person for China, in the sense that Hank Paulson, the former treasury secretary under the George W. Bush administration was widely recognized as a China specialist. He was kind of the "go-to" person. There isn't a "go-to" person in this administration so it become as little more confusing. But the cyber issue is exactly the right issue to be teeing up. In fact, there are two I think ought to be headline issues. One is cyber, to the extent it robs us of our intellectual property and therefore job creation and GDP growth potential, but the second issue, and I would be surprised if this wasn't covered in the meeting, is the fundamental need for state-owned enterprise reform within China. The state-owned enterprises have been available to write their own rules for the last ten years under the last administration, under Hu Jintao and they've gotten a way with a lot of bad behavior, and that needs to be reigned in for a lot of markets to function properly and for Americans to have anything resembling a level playing field. So, those are the two issues. The question now becomes, now that you've teed it up, what will the follow-up be and what coalitions will you have to make it happen?