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Post by Admin on Oct 15, 2020 23:38:45 GMT
President Trump told Fox Business’ Stuart Varney Thursday that if Joe Biden wins the presidential election, “China will own the United States.”
“If Biden wins, China will own the United States,” Trump asserted. “You know that, I turned that all around.”
Trump said that 10 years ago, “everybody projected by 2019 the economy of China was going to be bigger than the U.S.”
He continued, “Except that didn’t happen because I got elected. It turned out the opposite way.”
Donald Trump slammed his opponent Joe Biden during his rally at Johnstown, Pennsylvania. “This election is a simple choice," said the US President. "If Biden wins, China wins. All these other countries win. We get ripped off by everybody. If we win, you win, Pennsylvania wins, and America wins. Very simple,” he said.
Trump added, “Biden will eliminate my tariffs on China-- he has already said that he is going to take the tariffs off China. The one constant in Biden's platform is that he surrenders. That's why China and the far left are desperate for a Biden to win because he will surrender our jobs to China. China will own the United States if that sleepy guy gets the position.” Watch the full video for more details.
Trump pointed to his tariffs and anti-dumping orders.
In 2018, Trump enacted 25% tariffs on imported steel and 10% tariffs on imported aluminum. He also imposed a number of “anti-dumping” duties. Dumping occurs when manufacturers sell a product to another country at unusually low prices.
Trump also said that his administration would make China fund a U.S. stimulus bill.
“We’re going to take it from China, I’ll tell you right now it’s coming out of China,” Trump said. “They’re the ones that caused this problem.”
Varney asked the president how he proposed to do so.
“There is a lot of ways okay, there’s a lot of ways and I’ll figure every one of them out,” Trump said. “I already have them figured out. You know we’ve taken billions and billions of dollars for China over the last couple years.”
Trump again said he would go “higher” than the $1.8 trillion bill the White House offered, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected.
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Post by Admin on Dec 8, 2020 3:58:06 GMT
Such is the bipartisan consensus in Washington that China is both a competitor and a threat that Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, at times during their 2020 election campaigns, appeared to be trying to one-up each other in their bids to talk tough on Beijing.
Biden, who as President Barack Obama's vice president advocated engagement with China, has since abandoned any such calls, instead calling Chinese President Xi Jinping a "thug" and repeatedly criticizing Trump's trade and tariff war with China as being ineffective and failing to protect the US economy.
"There is very strong bipartisan perspective on China," said Heather Conley, the senior vice president for Europe, Eurasia, and the Arctic at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "Domestically, anything that President-elect Biden does politically on China will be met by a Republican Party that will say, you are being too soft."
If the new administration does retain a similarly tough stance toward China as Trump's, as expected, Biden's commitment to multilateralism and traditional alliances could prove a more effective tool for implementing that policy than Trump's go-it-alone approach, which often involved attacking the US's closest allies.
For one thing, Biden's commitment to multilateralism would be more similar to the European approach to trade disputes with China, which emphasizes negotiating commercial tensions through organizations like the World Trade Organization and the G20 group of rich and developing countries. That, in turn, would mean the collective negotiating might of the European Union and the US could pose a more effective counterweight to China's growing economic influence than the US acting alone.
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Post by Admin on Dec 16, 2020 4:00:59 GMT
A US telecoms expert believes China is snooping on Americans’ mobile phones in a number of Caribbean countries. Gary Miller’s claims are either proof of Beijing’s malfeasance, or drumbeats in the US’ march toward a new Cold War.
China allegedly used its second-largest telecoms operator – China Unicom – to send “tens of thousands” of so-called signaling messages to Americans in the Caribbean. These messages are usually used by operators to track phones and assess roaming charges, but Miller, a telecoms security consultant, told the Guardian on Tuesday that in some cases, they can be used for “tracking, monitoring, or intercepting communications.”
Miller noticed the apparent “mass surveillance” operation in 2018, and claimed that in addition to being targeted by China, US mobile users were also signaled by two Caribbean operators: Cable & Wireless Communications (Flow) in Barbados and Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC). Miller called this a “strong and clear” indicator that these companies were working in cahoots with Beijing. China Unicom denies the allegations.
Barbados and the Bahamas are popular vacation spots for Americans, and Miller said that he wants “the public to know about” the Chinese threat there, and wants US operators to toughen up mobile security.
Miller’s explosive claims made the story the Guardian’s top read on Tuesday. However, allegations of high-tech Chinese spying are nothing new in the US.
The Trump administration pushed a hard line on Beijing, hitting China with stiff import tariffs on one hand, and closing consulates and banning Chinese telecoms equipment due to espionage concerns on the other. Throughout Trump’s tenure, conservatives frequently sounded the alarm over China’s growing military and intelligence-gathering power, while liberals and the left remained fixated on Russia – blaming Moscow for everything from election meddling to cyber attacks on America’s infrastructure, to murdering jailed pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
That Biden will take a hawkish stance on Russia is disputed by few. The former vice president has spoken of reasserting America’s commitment to NATO, of backing the pro-Western opposition in Belarus, and of being keen to “stand up to autocrats like Putin” and “impose real costs on Russia.”
Backing him up are any number of sensationalist media stories about Vladimir Putin’s misdeeds. Russia has been accused of blasting American officials in Cuba and China with microwave radiation, of paying Taliban militants to kill US troops in Afghanistan, and of poisoning Alexey Navalny – a protest organizer built up in the West as supreme leader of the Russian opposition.
Regarding China, his administration will likely maintain a confrontational posture. Despite his son’s controversial business dealings in the country, and his own previous deference to “a rising China,” Biden’s proposed cabinet is packed with China hawks. His nominee for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, is keen on rounding up an alliance of pro-American nations to confront China, while his choice for national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, was described by Forbes this summer as a “Peter Navarro-like China hawk” who will do little to stop the US “decoupling” from the Asian superpower.
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Post by Admin on Dec 17, 2020 4:10:55 GMT
The US Treasury Department has designated Vietnam and Switzerland as “currency manipulators,” while placing China, India and several other countries on its “monitoring list.”
“The Treasury Department has taken a strong step today to safeguard economic growth and opportunity for American workers and businesses,” Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement on Wednesday, as he unveiled the department’s report on the “manipulators.”
The designation greenlights a set of maneuvers, envisioned under the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988, including calls for bilateral talks between the US and “manipulator” countries, as well as a complaint to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The “currency manipulator” designations is based on three criteria; a $20 billion-plus trade surplus with the US, current account surplus exceeding two percent of GDP and currency intervention exceeding two percent of GDP.
Both Switzerland and Vietnam meet the criteria, with the latter boasting a trade surplus of a whopping $57 billion, which has triggered repeated accusations from Washington that it is deliberately undervaluing its currency. Switzerland, which was added to the monitoring list in January, has already reacted to the designation with the Swiss National Bank promising to continue its aggressive monetary policies regardless of US pressure and saying it “does not engage in any form of currency manipulation.”
China, which was labeled a “currency manipulator” last August amid the heated trade war with the US, remains on the monitoring list. Beijing’s designation, which was not backed by the IMF, was withdrawn early this year, days before it reached a trade deal with Washington.
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Post by Admin on Jan 29, 2021 21:26:53 GMT
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, President Biden's nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, pledged to take a tougher line against China and its push to exert influence over the multinational organization during her Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday. "We know that China is working across the U.N. system to drive an authoritarian agenda that stands in opposition to the values of the institution," Thomas-Greenfield told lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations committee. "Their success depends on our continued withdrawal," she added. "That will not happen on my watch." It was an effort to show she would be tough on China, while also expressing remorse for giving a speech at a Chinese-funded foundation based on a university campus in Savannah, Ga., in 2019.  In the speech, Thomas-Greenfield offered qualified optimism that the U.S. and China could both be positive influences in Africa. Her remarks became a contentious issue for some members of the committee. That speech, said Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the committee, "has become quite the buzz in these hallways in recent days." "I personally am not going to hold one speech against somebody, but you are going to have to speak to that," he added. "I truly regret having accepted that invitation and having had my name associated with the Confucius Institute," Thomas-Greenfield said, referring to remarks she gave at Savannah State University, an historically black university. In an exchange with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., she said she accepted the speaking invitation not as a favor to the institute, which has since closed at the university, but because of her long-standing relationship with Savannah State. "I work very, very committedly to get out the message about foreign service careers across historically Black colleges and universities as well as Hispanic universities, because I strongly believe that our foreign service should be representative of America," she said. |
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