'Joe Biden has a big China problem': Trump preps campaign assault
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...blem-trump-preps-campaign-assault-on-fall-foe
“Joe Biden has a big China problem. Our data shows that Biden’s softness on China is a major vulnerability, among many,” Trump campaign Communications Director Tim Murtaugh told the Washington Examiner.
As vice president, Biden lavished praise on China during a state visit in August 2011. Biden, a Delaware senator from 1973-2009, said he’d been impressed with the country since he traveled there decades ago after the two countries normalized relations.
“Let me be clear: I believed in 1979 and said so then, and I believe now that a rising China is a positive development not only for the people of China but for the United States and the world as a whole,” Biden said.
During that speech, when discussing the U.S. budget, the then-vice president emphasized that he wasn’t passing judgment on China’s decadeslong authoritarian “one-child” policy, which strictly enforced family restrictions.
“As I was talking with some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China. You have no safety net. Your policy has been one, which I fully understand and I’m not second-guessing, of one child per family,” Biden said.
Biden claimed that “it is in our self-interest that China continue to prosper” because “a more prosperous China will mean more demand for American-made goods and services and more jobs back home in the United States of America.”
Those remarks were echoed six months later in a February speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, amid he and President Barack Obama's reelection campaign.
“Let me be clear: I believe, as the president said also to the vice president in the Oval Office not long ago,” he said, referencing then-Vice President Xi Jinping, China's current ruler. “We believe that a rising China is a positive development not only for China but also for the United States and the world.”
More recently, Biden was hammered by the Trump campaign and other Republicans for seemingly downplaying the economic threat posed by China.
"China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” Biden said in Iowa City, Iowa, in May 2019. "They can't figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system.”
He added: “They’re not bad folks, folks. … They’re not competition for us.”
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