Patriotism Over Capitalism: Chris Fenton on What America Must Learn
In this eye-opening conversation, Hollywood executive and author Chris Fenton breaks down the long-term consequences of America’s economic engagement with China — consequences he predicted in his book and that have now come to pass.
Fenton explains how Hollywood was the canary in the coal mine: once thriving in China, the industry is now nearly shut out, losing up to 95% of its former market share. He draws a straight line between this and broader trends across other U.S. industries, from automotive to apparel. American companies, he argues, exchanged intellectual property, tech, and trade secrets for short-term access to the Chinese market — effectively training their future competitors.
The result? Chinese giants like BYD and Li-Ning are now outpacing their American counterparts. “We taught them how to fish in order to sell them fish,” Fenton says, “and now they catch their own.”
As for what America should do next, Fenton advocates a pragmatic, non-combative approach to China — one that emphasizes cultural and commercial cooperation, while firmly defending U.S. values and economic interests. He introduces his framework, Fenton’s Five Forces, to highlight areas where cooperation is possible and where it’s not.
In the final moments, Fenton connects the dots between border security and aggressive tariffs, explaining how both are essential tools to protect American labor from the forces of globalization — whether that’s offshore manufacturing or unchecked immigration. He reminds listeners that these were once core Democratic policies, before shifting political winds.
The key takeaway? To protect the American middle class, it’s time to put patriotism before capitalism — and learn from the economic playbook China used so well.
Transcript
Chuck Warren: So tell me quickly here more about your book. I remember it coming up. I remember people talking about it, which is always a good sign for a book when they're talking about it. What has changed since you wrote the book about China and the U.S. relations?
Chris Fenton: Yeah. Well, the biggest thing that happened was over since the book came out through COVID and to today, Hollywood, which I was talking about, was going to happen to them. We lost a major market in China. We had as much as 80 percent of every dollar that came into that market.
10, 15 years ago, and now we're down to about 5%. We taught them how to fish in order to sell them fish, and now they catch their own fish. And I warned that the same thing was going to happen with every other industry. And we're starting to see that more and more.
In fact, the automotive business has been extremely vocal about it. Nike has been extremely vocal about it. There's all kinds of competitors, whether you're in auto, BYD, that's now kicking Tesla's butt to Li Ning and Anta. That's, you know, the fiercest competitor to Nike. We created those companies. We taught them process.
We swapped IP and tech in order to get that access to the market. And now it's killing us.
Chuck Warren: What do you think the United States should do about China, especially on a business level?
Chris Fenton: Well, the biggest thing we got to remember is we don't want to go to war with China. Nor does China want to go to war with us. So we want to avoid kinetic conflict. We have to come to grips with the fact that I don't think Xi nor most experts is going anywhere. When you have a propaganda system that only has one form of news and information for its masses,
they think the system works for them. They're not going to overthrow Xi. China is not going anywhere either. They're becoming a huge awakened dragon. So we need to realize that we're never going to agree them with I call them Fenton's five forces.
We're not going to agree with them on national security issues, politics or human rights issues. But we can work with them culturally and commercially. All we got to do is put patriotism before capitalism.
Chuck Warren: I want to go. We have about one minute left here, but you wrote another piece called a secure border and aggressive tariffs go together. Why do they go together?
Chris Fenton: Well, the fact is all boarders do is protect essentially cheap labor from coming in and taking labor opportunities away from the American worker. Offshoring and the way that we were essentially moving our manufacturing complex offshore was to source that cheap labor a different way.
So you either bring in the cheap labor or you go source it in other markets. So it's the exact same thing. We're just trying to protect American workers from that phenomenon that has really decimated our middle class.
Chuck Warren: Well, you and I are both old enough that that used to be a premier policy of the Democrats.
Chris Fenton: It was a premier policy all the way up to, I would say, probably 2012 or so. Yeah, it's very recent that this has changed.
Chuck Warren: Yeah, no, I mean, I remember Gephardt and everybody just saying, this is what you need to do.
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