It’s becoming increasingly evident that Joe Biden is China’s preferred candidate in the 2020 presidential election.
Several Chinese state-owned media outlets, including China Daily and the China Global Television Network (CGTN), have now expressed support for the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, a group of disaffected “NeverTrump” Republicans.
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) affinity for Biden should not come as a great shock. The former vice president has been a great ally to China throughout his decades-long political career. As a senator, Biden voted to approve Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China back in 2000, granting China unprecedented access to America’s markets despite its abysmal record on human rights and brazen violation of international trade rules.
Even now, he absurdly insists that the world’s second-largest economy doesn’t even represent “competition” for the U.S.
Additionally, in the ongoing diplomatic spat between China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, Joe Biden has consistently supported “engagement” with the communist regime — a position that is functionally equivalent to abandoning a longtime ally that also happens to be a bastion of democracy offering hope to all of mainland China.
Biden stated in 2001 — more than a decade after Beijing’s brutal massacre of pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square — that the United States should not defend Taiwan if it declares itself an independent nation. The Chinese media undoubtedly anticipates that Joe Biden’s past pro-China rhetoric would inform his actions if he’s elected in November.
As Attorney General William Barr warned in a recent speech, China spent decades biding its time as it steadily expanded its military, economic, and diplomatic strength through both legitimate and nefarious means, but in recent years it has become increasingly aggressive, sensing that its time is rapidly approaching.
“To tilt the playing field to its advantage, China’s communist government has perfected a wide array of predatory and often unlawful tactics: currency manipulation, tariffs, quotas, state-led strategic investment and acquisitions, theft and forced transfer of intellectual property, state subsidies, dumping, cyberattacks, and espionage,” Barr explained, noting that a significant majority of all trade and espionage prosecutions involve activity that would benefit China.
Along the way, the attorney general added, “China has reaped enormous benefits from the free flow of American aid and trade,” starting when Congress granted Beijing most-favored-nation trading status in 1980, and accelerating after the 1990s, when American companies strongly supported China’s accession to the World Trade Organization and the permanent normalization of trade relations. Biden was a cheerleader for all of those misguided initiatives, which led to skyrocketing trade deficits and the loss of millions of American jobs.
A Biden presidency would also be in Beijing’s geopolitical interest. America’s economy took a drubbing during the artificial downturn caused by the pandemic that originated in Wuhan, China. We need the “V-shaped” recovery that is already emerging thanks to President Trump’s pro-growth policies, not a return to the policies that gave us the slowest recovery since World War II during the Obama-Biden administration.
To maintain our geostrategic power and influence, the U.S. economy must continue to be the largest, strongest, and most dynamic in the world. Joe Biden would take us in the opposite direction, imposing crippling tax hikes, expanding government control over the economy, and burdening companies with costly and unnecessary regulations.
Biden has proposed trillions of dollars in new spending that will have to be financed in large part by China, along with new anti-energy regulations that would destroy tens of millions of American jobs and dramatically increase the cost of living and doing business in the United States.
The recently-released “Unity Platform” — a collaboration between the Biden Campaign and democratic-socialist Senator Bernie Sanders — shows that Biden is willing to make extraordinary concessions to the most extreme factions of his party.
America is the greatest nation in the world because of its people and the ability for every citizen to achieve the American Dream. There is no question that China has a vested interest in keeping the United States, its largest geopolitical and economic rival, from rebounding quickly after the pandemic. The surest way for that to happen is for Joe Biden to be elected president.
Matt Whitaker is the Former U.S. Attorney General.