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WASHINGTON (REUTERS) – United States President Donald Trump has taken advantage of Americans’ growing animosity toward China over the coronavirus outbreak to back his reelection speech, arguing that he will hit Beijing harder than anyone.
That’s a very tough conversation, barely backed by action, says Jake Sullivan, senior adviser to presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Biden’s campaign is preparing to implement policies on how his future administration would best deal with China and will continue to show how Trump is weak with respect to the United States’ main geopolitical and economic competitor, Sullivan told Reuters in an interview.
“The vice president intends to do two things: hold Trump accountable for a catastrophic set of flaws in his approach to China, and a colossal gap between tough talk and weak action,” said Sullivan, one of several former officials at the Obama administration that make up Mr. Biden’s foreign policy team.
Biden served as President Barack Obama’s No. 2 for eight years.
On the coronavirus, Biden will continue to criticize Trump for repeatedly praising Chinese President Xi Jinping despite global concerns about the lack of transparency about the severity of the crisis, Sullivan said.
On global alliances, Biden’s team argues that Trump is helping China by undermining America’s relations with traditional allies and by reducing America’s role and influence in international institutions.
In the years-long trade war with China, Biden’s campaign will highlight his claim that Americans have paid a significant price while getting little in return.
“It is okay that the president wants to put pressure on China to make changes,” Sullivan said. “But they judge you not by the push, but by the changes.”
Both candidates are spending millions of dollars ahead of the Nov. 3 election on ad campaigns targeting the other’s record in China, which has quickly become a focal point of the U.S. presidential race.
The Trump campaign claims that Biden will not be as harsh on China, the country the Republican president blames for the pandemic that killed more than 80,000 people in the United States and saw 20.5 million Americans lose jobs in April.
In an email sent to his followers on Tuesday, the Trump campaign called Biden the “China’s loving candidate.”
“Joe Biden has a terrible record in China, having spoiled them during his four decades in Washington,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Sarah Matthews of Biden, who also served as a US senator.
“President Trump will always hold China accountable for his actions, but Beijing Biden cannot be trusted to fight for the interests of the United States,” he added.
Trump in recent weeks has increased his criticism of Beijing and threatened new tariffs, and officials are considering retaliating for the outbreak.
Negative views of China among Americans have grown to the highest levels in 15 years, with two-thirds of people holding an unfavorable view of the country, up to 20 percentage points since Trump took office, according to a poll by the Center for Pew investigation conducted in March. amid the coronavirus pandemic.
‘LEAVE A VOID’
Rather than Trump’s U.S.-only approach to China, Biden would work with like-minded countries to pressure the world’s No. 2 economy, strengthen technology transfer restrictions and raise human rights issues to the highest level, he said. Sullivan.
Democrats say it is a smart strategy to make the election a referendum on Trump’s record in China, particularly with independent voters who will be critical in a competition likely to be decided by tight margins.
A Reuters / Ipsos poll from April 15 to 21 showed that 52 percent of independents disapprove of China’s handling of the president, compared to 33 percent who approved of it.
Some analysts and policy experts in China say Biden will eventually have to provide a detailed picture of how he can improve in China, a task that could be complicated by the legacy of the Obama-Biden administration’s China policy.
Chinese leaders had “licked their chops” at the Obama administration’s insistence that major global problems could not be solved without their help, said Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Energy Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
A Biden administration should be careful not to “get bogged down” in political dialogues with Beijing, he said.
Biden surprised the foreign policy community last year when he downplayed China’s ability to compete with the United States.
Sullivan has recognized that getting US allies to USA Being on the same page to face China will not be an easy task. But he defended Biden’s insistence on a multilateral approach to dealing with China, calling it a “soft word” but “not a soft policy.”
Bringing together advanced market economies to pressure China would be “much better than simply having the United States choose to try to wage a trade war with China on our own,” he added.
He also said that Biden would seek to expand restrictions on the transfer of technology to China used to facilitate China’s detention of a million or more ethnic-majority ethnic groups in the Xinjiang country region, a problem that Biden would directly raise with Xi.
Sullivan said Biden would increase funding for American innovation, education and infrastructure, arguing that the Trump administration had given way to China in the race for science and technology.
“Trump is literally leaving a vacuum for China to fill,” said Sullivan. “You have someone in the Oval Office who is obsessed with steel, coal, and battleships, rather than quantum computing, AI, and biotechnology.”
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