Susan Walsh/AP Photo
Trump and Xi in Osaka, Japan, June 2019
One of the most startling revelations in John Bolton’s book is the conversation between Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, in which Trump literally asked Xi to help him get re-elected. The specific request was for China to buy more U.S. farm exports.
“Make sure I win,” Trump said flatly. One can only imagine Xi’s reaction.
Trump’s China policy has oscillated wildly between demonizing China and sucking up to China. Last year, Trump authorized his chief trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, to take a hard line with Beijing, as a way to force China to alter its system of state-subsidized quasi-capitalism. But most of Trump’s actual policies, except for some tariffs, were empty gestures—and none was seriously directed at changing China’s system or global role.
When it came to the COVID pandemic, Trump’s oscillations were even crazier. He began by praising China’s actions to contain the disease, and ended by suggesting that China deliberately spread it and maybe even created it. As recently as his Tulsa speech, Trump referred to the virus as “Kung Flu.”
Maybe the pitch to Xi is that if Trump is re-elected, China has nothing to fear, thanks to Trump’s sheer incoherence. His anti-China rants are nothing but posturing, whereas a Biden administration might actually have a coherent China policy.
But what sort of policy remains to be seen.
Recent Democratic administrations have been all too indulgent of Beijing. The Clinton administration, under the guidance of Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, kept China out of the World Trade Organization until China agreed to let U.S. investment banks like Rubin’s alma mater Goldman Sachs into its financial markets. Then China was welcomed into the WTO with no quid pro quos on its other predatory behavior.
Maybe the pitch to Xi is that if Trump is re-elected, China has nothing to fear, thanks to Trump’s sheer incoherence.
The Obama administration was far more serious about promoting pro-corporate trade policies with proposed trade deals such as the now defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership than about changing China’s mercantilist behavior.
The Biden campaign was quick to pounce on the Bolton revelation with a press advisory calling attention to Trump’s contradictions, but shedding little light on what a Biden administration would do. Some of Trump’s advisers have called for a harder line, but been equivocal on just what that might mean.
What’s coming is an epic three-way struggle over America’s China policy. On one side, we have Trump, and the primitive jingoists, engaging in hard-line nativist rhetoric, but no coherent policy.
Then we have the traditional bipartisan and corporate trade establishment, hoping that if the U.S. keeps knitting together business deals with China, the Chinese Communist Party will somehow become more democratic and capitalist. Dream on.
Finally, we have the progressive economic nationalists, who recognize that China has been eating America’s economic lunch, breaking the rules of supposedly free trade, stealing intellectual property, subsidizing exports below costs, and achieving dominance in one industry after another. Reclaiming American technological leadership will require a combined industrial policy and trade policy that denies China access to America’s domestic markets and to partnerships with U.S. companies if China keeps breaking the rules.
Progressive critics have been gaining ground in the trade debate. Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon recently proposed that the U.S. quit the World Trade Organization, as an institution of supposedly free trade that is hopelessly captured by corporate interests.
China’s use of illicit mercantilism, and its buy-off of American corporations and banks, has been documented over and over again by the U.S.-China Commission. You would think there would be an open-and-shut case for the progressive economic nationalism approach. But think again.
Though Biden has been moving left on many issues, he tends to be most comfortable with familiar faces when it comes to economic policy. It’s anybody’s guess where a Biden administration will land when it comes to China policy.
The U.S. as an open society is all too permeable to rivals such as China. But America’s latest accidental strategy of inscrutability is incoherence. Take that, Xi!
