Coronavirus and US Elections: What's Behind Trump's Aggressive New Strategy on China
The tensions between the United States and China are long-standing, but the coronavirus and the impending US presidential campaign have amplified the rivalry, taking the war of words to a higher point. What is the strategy of the White House?
This week, President Donald J. Trump turned his campaign around for reelection in this year's election.
"China will do everything it can to make me lose this race," the president told Reuters.
His sharp anti-Beijing rhetoric marked a new phase in an effort to reframe an election that has been transformed by the coronavirus pandemic.
It also heralded more turbulent times for the already unstable relationship between the world's two largest economies.
The Trump team had planned to make the thriving US economy the focus of the campaign, but that strategy fell through.
In addition, polls show that support for the president is falling in key states, amid criticism of the White House for managing the crisis unleashed by the coronavirus.
This is how China now appears, where the pandemic originated and accused of responding very slowly to its global contagion.
Taking it with Beijing
Right now, the Republican Party's strategy is focused on attacking former Vice President Joe Biden, who is almost certainly the Democratic Party's presidential candidate for the 2020 elections.
Trump's allies in the political action committee America First Action (AFA), a group that is dedicated to raising funds to support the president's candidacy, have been running ads attacking "Beijing Biden" for "leading the charge" of the elite. Washington, too willing to make concessions to predatory China.
Biden responded to the attack with an advisory accusing Trump of trying to deflect blame for his own late response to the pandemic and for being overconfident with initial information provided by China on the virus.
The common element between these markedly different stances is that both campaign teams believe it is useful policy to say that their candidate will take tougher stances against Beijing.
"If you look at the most recent Pew Center polls and Gallup polls, they show that Americans' mistrust of China - be they Republicans or Democrats - is at all-time highs," says Kelly Sadler, AFA communications director.
"This is a universal issue that Republicans and Democrats agree on," he adds.
Negative perception
There has certainly been an upswing in negative views of China in the United States since Trump came to the White House and launched the trade war.
When it comes to Beijing's responsibility for the coronavirus crisis, however, he has swung his position, praising President Xi Jinping at times and ranting against the "Chinese virus" at other times.
But Trump has now begun to adopt a tough campaign speech, promising to make China pay for the damage.
The aggressive rhetoric is based on growing anger, in the government and among many lawmakers, at the Chinese government's lack of transparency about the virus that has brought global disaster.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been at the fore in this. He frequently declares that the Communist Party of China cannot be trusted.
In addition, it highlights Beijing's inability to contain the virus shortly after it emerged and calls into question the safety of its laboratories.
Beijing, for its part, rejects all these questions.
Michael Green, who was President George W. Bush's Asia adviser, notes that there are concerns about China's behavior across the entire political spectrum.
But there are members of Trump's national security team who have "a very zero-sum game perspective on relations with China and are especially focused on preventing China from taking advantage of any situation."
Chinese propaganda
Green says that President Xi Jinping's strategy manual is also "much more aggressive" than that of his predecessors.
He stresses that there is a strong propaganda campaign that has even suggested that the virus originates from the US military.
"There is an ideological and geopolitical zero-sum twist in China's play, which predates Donald Trump," he says.
But that nationalist and authoritarian drift has collided with the Trump administration's "America First" nationalism, increasing confrontation and avoiding the kind of cooperation that would serve to combat the pandemic and prevent another from occurring.
Green stresses that before Trump became president there were more than two dozen American and Chinese experts from the Centers for Disease Control "working on these issues" in Beijing.
When this crisis exploded there were only three or four, although Green believes that it is the fault of both governments.
National security experts in Trump's inner circle counter "New York globalists" who argue that the United States needs China for business and commerce.
"The relationship between China and the United States is going to be very uneven from now on," says Gary Locke, a Sino-American who was Barack Obama's ambassador to Beijing.
"It will be antagonistic on one level, but it will also be seeking great cooperation on the economic front, because there are so many American farmers who depend on China to buy what they produce," he predicts.
Hawks and pigeons
As the election date approaches, Trump has indicated that he will listen more to the "hawks" than the "doves" who are part of his clique of conflicting advisers.
And his attitude will be celebrated by a group of Republican lawmakers who have been pressuring the government to come forward with China.
Several congressmen have proposed laws or suggested ideas to punish Beijing for hiding or distorting information about the coronavirus.
The states of Missouri and Mississippi have taken the unprecedented step of suing for damages.
And the fiercest critic of China in the party, Senator Tom Cotton, has gone so far as to accuse the Chinese government of deliberately allowing the virus to leave its borders "because if they were going to suffer an economic contraction they were not going to allow May the world continue to prosper. "
His call to relocate supply lines to the United States will resonate with both parties as the pandemic has focused on how much the United States depends on China for medicines and medical equipment.
At the same time, concern is highlighted that anti-China rhetoric is reinforcing xenophobia that was already growing due to the pandemic, which has led to an increase in physical and verbal attacks on Asian Americans.
"Just because I'm a Chinese-American doesn't mean I'm a Chinese government official," Gary Locke wryly remarked about his unexpected appearance in Trump's campaign ad targeting Biden.
The former vice president has also been criticized from the left for going beyond Trump's anti-China discourse (assuming his same discursive line), instead of questioning his rhetoric of "racist nationalism."
Both campaign teams deny they are fueling xenophobia, but China has been left squarely in the middle of an election at a time when voters are upset and concerned about how they will earn their livelihood.
By November, when the elections are planned, they could be more upset and poorer.
Your votes will show who they blame.
