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London (BBC)
This week, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, revised his campaign path for reelection to a new presidential term in 2020.
“China will do everything in its power to lose the presidential election,” Trump told Reuters news agency.
His sharp rhetoric against Beijing marked a new stage in an attempt to reformulate the elections, which the Coronavirus epidemic has reformed.
This speech also indicated more tension in the already strained relations between the world’s two largest economies.
The Trump campaign had planned to make the booming U.S. economy its main center, but that trend had failed, and polls show a decline in support for the president in key states in the presidential race, amid criticism of its performance in the Corona crisis. So Trump resorted to injecting the epidemic into China in the campaign, accusing it of acting too slowly to stop its spread in the world.
Face Beijing
In fact, the Republican strategy (in the presidential campaign) focuses on attacking former Vice President Joe Biden, the alleged Democratic candidate in the 2020 elections.
Trump’s allies on the “America First Action” political committee ran ads trying to link Biden and China and criticized what she called “Biden Beijing” for what he saw as his leadership of an elite in Washington who was more willing to coexist with “predatory” China in its expression.
Biden responded with an announcement accusing the president of trying to deflect blame for his slow response to the epidemic, and accusing Trump of trusting too much Chinese initial information about the virus.
The common element of these two completely different positions is that both campaigns believe that it is good to propose to your man that he will be the strongest against Beijing.
If you look at the latest polls conducted by the Pew and Gallup polls, the confidence of Americans, Republicans or Democrats, in China has reached its highest level in nearly two-thirds of Americans, says Kelly Sadler of America First Action.
“This is a global issue on which Republicans and Democrats agree,” he says.
Negative outlook
To be sure, there has been a significant increase in negative prospects for China since Trump took office and fueled the trade war.
And when it comes to Beijing’s responsibility for the Corona crisis, Trump has been changing his stance, sometimes praising his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, and other times attacking the “Chinese virus.”
But now he has begun to embrace the campaign’s militant rhetoric, vowing to make China pay for the damage.
Trump builds this aggressive rhetoric on mounting anger in the administration and many lawmakers on the Chinese government’s lack of transparency about the virus that caused the global catastrophe.
The US Secretary of State. The USA, Mike Pompeo, was at the forefront in this regard, as he has consistently stated that the CPC cannot be trusted. He drew attention to Beijing’s inability to contain the virus after it appeared, and questioned the safety standards of its laboratories, allegations that China vehemently denies.
Michael Green, who was an adviser to President George W. Bush on Asian issues, says there are concerns across the political spectrum about China’s behavior.
But members of Trump’s national security team “have a very clear vision of relations with China and are particularly focused on preventing China from gaining any advantage from any situation.”
Chinese propaganda
Green believes that Chinese President Qi Jinping’s method of handling was “more aggressive” than his predecessors, signaling the intensification of a strong Chinese propaganda campaign that reached the point that the virus originated in the US military.
However, this authoritarian (Chinese) national transformation collided with the dominant American nationalism of the Trump administration, raising first the slogan of the United States, which intensified the confrontation and avoided some type of cooperation that could lead to fighting the epidemic and preventing a new wave.
Green points out that before President Trump took office, there were more than two dozen CDC American and Chinese experts “working to address these issues,” and when the crisis erupted there were only 3 or 4, he believed The two governments they are to blame for that.
Trump’s inner circle is seeing a clash between national security experts and “supporters of globalization in New York,” who argue that the United States needs China to operate and trade.
“The relationship between China and the United States will be very different in the future,” says Gary Locke, an American of Chinese descent who was ambassador to former US President Barack Obama in Beijing.
“The relationship will be hostile on one level, but it will also seek great cooperation on the economic front, because many American farmers depend on China to buy what they produce,” he said.
Hawks and pigeons
As the elections approached, Trump indicated that he would listen to hawks more than pigeons among the conflicting advisers, and thus he would be received by several Republican lawmakers who press the administration to confront China.
Many of these MPs have proposed legislation or ideas that could punish Beijing for hiding or falsifying information about the Coronavirus.
Two states, Missouri and Mississippi, have taken an unprecedented step in filing claims for damage caused by the virus.
The party’s fiercest critic, Senator Tom Cotton, went so far as to accuse the Chinese government of deliberately allowing the virus to leak across the border “because if they suffered an economic downturn they would not allow the world to continue to prosper.”
However, his call to return supply lines to the United States will resonate between the two sides because the epidemic has drawn attention to the United States’ dependence on drugs and China’s medical team.
There is concern that the rhetoric against China is reinforcing the xenophobic atmosphere that is already mounting due to the epidemic, resulting in increased verbal and physical attacks on Asian Americans.
Gary Locke noted with concern his unexpected appearance on the campaign trail for Trump’s rival, Democrat Joe Biden, and said: “Just because he’s Chinese-American doesn’t mean he’s a Chinese government official.”
The left also criticized Biden’s own team for what they saw as adopting a speech that coincided with and goes beyond Trump’s speech, rather than challenging this speech, which they describe as a “racist nationalist.”
Both campaigns denied accusations of fueling xenophobia. But China has been bluntly placed at the center of the electoral race at a time when voters feel angry and fearful of their livelihoods.
By November (the date of the presidential elections), they may become more angry and poor. Your ballots will appear guilty.
