Now that former Vice President Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic challenger to President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election, the two politicians’ records…
Now that former Vice President Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic challenger to President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election, the two politicians’ records on China can and should be compared.
How to deal with China, the nascent superpower in the East, has been a contentious issue for some time. It was even one of the defining questions of the 2016 presidential campaign. Particularly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, for which it is at least partially responsible, China’s growing power and influence will remain an important issue going into the 2020 presidential campaign cycle.
Biden’s tangled multi-decade relationship with China
Biden’s attitude toward China throughout his political career has been somewhat dismissive, though his family has developed ties to the country that deserve careful scrutiny.
As recently as May 2019 in a campaign stump speech, Joe Biden said:
Even a decade ago, the idea that China is “not competition” would have been inaccurate. Manufacturing began to flee the U. S. for the cheaper Chinese markets almost immediately following China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001.
Biden even referred to Trump’s travel ban on China, effective February 2 and now supported by most of the Democratic Party, as “hysteria, xenophobia and fear-mongering.”
The relationship between China and the Bidens gets more complicated once Hunter Biden, Joe’s son, gets involved.
