We know that Trump is going to try and paint Biden as being soft on China. How should Biden respond? I would suggest something like this:
- Historically, members of both parties hoped and believed that integrating China into the web of global commerce would result, not just in increased prosperity, but in a friendlier and more democratic country. That clearly didn’t happen. China is becoming more aggressive and authoritarian by the day.
- That said, our relationship with China is complicated, and we need to use carrots as well as sticks. We need to be able to cooperate with the Chinese on a variety of issues, including the virus and climate change.
- Trump’s response to the Chinese challenge has been blustery, but singularly inept. He sucks up to Xi, ignores human rights issues, imposes tariffs for no clear purpose, and does his best to alienate the allies we need to change Chinese behavior. As a result, we have made no real progress on North Korea, the Chinese are continuing to militarize rocks in the South China Sea, and Taiwan and Hong Kong are under increased pressure. In addition, American consumers are paying more than they need to for Chinese manufactured goods, which benefits exactly no one in either country.
- We need a new approach. We need to work with our allies to change the rules of world trade in our favor, instead of annoying them by calling them worse than the Chinese. We need to maintain a strong military presence in the South China Sea in order to keep our allies’ trade routes open. We need an open and transparent investigation of the origins of the virus to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We should not, however, make ridiculous demands for compensation that are never going to be satisfied, and we need to respond to the economic challenge by fixing things that we can control instead of insisting that the Chinese simply give up their attempts to modernize, because that isn’t going to happen.
- Most of all, we need to stop using China as a scapegoat for our problems. China didn’t force us to respond so poorly to the virus. China didn’t demand that we shred our safety net, or treat climate change as a hoax, or pass a huge tax cut that primarily helps wealthy people, or put the regulatory screws to our workers. We did that to ourselves by electing a man who is clearly unfit for his office. If you elect me, that will stop.