The United States has been sending one diplomat after another to China this year, seeking an audience with Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders. Joe Biden has been doing this despite the Chinese Communist Party basically thumbing its nose at the United States and aggressively seeking to undermine us around the globe. We recently sent over both the Secretary of State and the Treasury Secretary, and now Gina Raimondo, our supposed Secretary of Commerce, is over in Beijing asking to discuss trade deals. China’s Commerce Minister said that their country is ready to “foster a more favorable policy environment for stronger cooperation” but thus far it sounds as if nothing is being put on the table and this is all just a show for CCP state media outlets. Perhaps someone in our vaunted press corps could find time to ask Joe Biden what exactly our policy toward China is these days and what he hopes to accomplish with these diplomatic outings, assuming he ever comes off of vacation and agrees to take an actual question. (Associated Press)
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and her Chinese counterpart expressed a desire to improve trade conditions on Monday, as Raimondo began a visit to Beijing aimed at warming chilly relations, but neither side appeared willing to make concessions on the other’s main demands.
Raimondo joined American officials including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in July who have visited China in the past three months. They expressed optimism about improving communication but have announced no progress on technology, security, human rights and other disputes that have plunged relations to their lowest level in decades.
For its part, Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s government wants to revive foreign investor interest in China as it tries to reverse a deepening economic slump.
If Raimondo winds up getting rolled by the Chinese it probably shouldn’t come as any great surprise. As with so many people in the Biden administration, she has virtually no background in the area she is supposed to oversee. Her educational background was in liberal arts and law, and aside from a brief stint flirting with venture capital, she’s basically been a career politician. She has no experience in international trade and she was picked for this post owing to political considerations.
With that said, I don’t see any reports of discussions involving issues of substance taking place. Before we even think of cutting even more favorable trade deals with China, they should be talking to us about their aggressive military posture in the Pacific, the new bases they are establishing in the western hemisphere, including Cuba, and all of the land they’ve started buying up in the United States for some mysterious reason.
Even if they agreed to that, Raimondo should be asking her counterpart to comment on the vastly uneven trade deficit we have with China and the threat they pose to the global supply chain. Every favorable trade deal we establish with the Chinese translates to a new migration of cash from us to them. Every such agreement delays our return to increasing manufacturing at home and reducing our dependence on hostile foreign actors. All of this ignores the fact that we have our Commerce Secretary over there begging for handouts from the same country that is constantly threatening to invade Taiwan and drag us to the precipice of another war, potentially a nuclear one.
China’s economy has recently seen a significant downturn. That’s the only reason they are open to talking to us at this point. And unlike our current administration, Beijing knows how to cut deals that benefit China ahead of anyone else’s interests, including ours. Why would Biden be taking this approach with our greatest foreign adversary? It’s hard to say, but after the tens of millions of dollars that the Bidens took from the Chinese when he was Vice President, maybe they’re just looking to cash in on their investment.
I get that Joe Biden isn’t exactly an “America First” kind of guy and he never will be. But we can’t tolerate an “America Last” President. Let’s focus on trade with our diminishing number of remaining allies who still at least claim to like us and want to be partners with us. The various dictators from the New Axis of Evil are doing just fine on their own, sadly. They don’t need our help, and plenty of our NATO partners should be signing on to help us centralize our own supply chain management issues. “Normalizing” relations with China is a dead-end road simply because China isn’t looking for “normal.” They’re looking for global dominance and they are unfortunately well along the road to achieving those goals. And the road in question would be the Belt and Road Initiative. We should not be abetting that scheme in any fashion whatsoever.
