US President Joe Biden did a disservice to ties between Washington and Beijing – and between the US-dominated West and China in general – with his latest barbs against the Chinese government in an error-riddled re-election campaign appearance in Park City, Utah on Thursday.
According to US media and international newswire reports, such as Fortune* business magazine, Bloomberg and AFP, the octogenarian head of state claimed at the fundraiser that China was a “ticking time bomb” because of economic challenges the country was facing, adding: “That’s not good because when bad folks have problems, they do bad things”.
My gosh, how could he come up with such a sweepingly condescending claim, even when addressing a fundraising event.
I first became aware of his gibes when local Chinese friends, who expressed their outrage about them, asked me about my response. Initially, I suspected that his apparent choice of words was mistranslated, because of which I searched on the internet for the original English-language coverage of the fundraiser, which confirmed that my suspicion was misplaced. This was not a case of “lost in translation”, but sheer undiplomatic rudeness.
Biden made the remarks at a fundraiser which, according to The Salt Lake Tribune, wasn’t cheap for those who chose to attend it: “Donors who pony up US$50,000 will get to speak with the president and have a photo taken. At the US$25,000 and US$10,000 level attendees will get a photo with Biden,” the newspaper reported in the run-up to the event. Tickets for the event started at US$3,300, while “hosts” had to fork out US$100,000.
The pool report also said that Biden described China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as the “debt and noose” and claimed that China’s economic growth rate was now “close to 2 percent a year”. Biden also claimed that in China “the number of people who are of retirement age is larger than the number of people of working age,” a claim “off by hundreds of millions of people,” as Fortune pointed out, which quoted Josef Gregory Mahoney, a politics and international relations professor at Shanghai’s East China Normal University, as saying that the central authorities in Beijing were unlikely to be “baited” into responding to Biden’s latest anti-China sneers.
“Beijing knows [that] Biden will resort increasingly to anti-China dog whistle tactics to rally popular support at home,” Mahoney said, who was quick to add: “But it’s also important to remember that Beijing heard a lot worse from Trump.”
Ceteris paribus, Biden and Trump will run for the top job in Washington next year. As a non-American, I would prefer both the Republicans and the Democrats bring in new blood and fresh ideas needed for a post that is one of the world’s most important and intellectually and physically demanding.
Tom Orlik, chief economist for Bloomberg Economics, commented that Biden’s remarks about the magnitude of China’s economic issues were both wrong and inflammatory. He said that we needed to be ready to brace for more incendiary language ahead of next year’s US presidential election, “as US politicians buy voter support at home at the price of additional risk in relations with Beijing.”
Anyway, China’s economy is on track to grow by 5.2 percent this year, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists last month. By comparison, the US economy is predicted to grow by 1.6 percent and the EU economy by 1.0 percent this year, according to economists.
Biden’s anti-China digs in Utah came just one day after he issued an executive order aimed at restricting certain American investments in sensitive high-tech areas in China – including, according to the order’s appendix, Hong Kong and Macau – a move that the Foreign Ministry in Beijing described as “naked economic coercion and technological bullying.”
The current relationship between China and the West, the US in particular, is certainly knotty and tangled. The best way, in my view, to tackle the predicament is to maintain candid but friendly dialogue. The world is going through a particularly tumultuous period. Consequently, international politics is in desperate need for dialogue about topics such as poverty alleviation, climate crisis management and the growing menace of trade protectionism.
The globally crucial US-China dialogue should remain unimpeded by all the anti-Beijing rhetoric that we can expect from the American presidential election campaign.
That’s why I still hope that President Xi Jinping and Biden will meet at the APEC summit in San Francisco on November 15-17 – with Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu there too. Constructive dialogue instead of uncouth barbs, please!
Biden’s anti-China affront came just a few days after China’s seasoned Foreign Minister Wang Yi told EU foreign policy supremo Josep Borrell that both sides should conduct more “institutional dialogues” to inject new and strong impetus into their comprehensive strategic partnership.
Both exchanged views during a phone conversation on August 6.
Wang underlined that the EU’s Global Gateway strategy and the BRI are not rivals but complementary to each other, as both aim to promote global development. Unlike the BRI, which was launched by Xi a decade ago, Brussels’ Global Gateway is still in its infancy, having only been launched in December 2021.
In an enlightening interview with Germany’s influential Berliner Zeitung (“Berlin Newspaper”)**, published yesterday, Chinese Ambassador to Germany Wu Ken said it was “groundless to categorise China as a risk”.
The ambassador, a former exchange student in Germany, emphasised that “China wants to solve conflicts through dialogue and consultations.”
The ambassador also deplored, rightly so, attempts by certain German politicians to restrict Chinese students’ enrolment in German universities on alleged national security grounds. I hope that the attempts will be nipped in the bud. It would be a disaster for Sino-German relations, apart from the inevitable racist connotations that such a move would entail. I am sure that the officials concerned would vehemently deny that racism is involved, but in politics, as any realist knows, it is perception that counts.
Exchanges of students, researchers and scientists benefit socio-economic development, mutual understanding and innovation, not just on a bilateral but even on global level. I was an exchange student in Spain in the early 1970s. I found the experience immensely rewarding, irrespective of the stark differences in the political systems of West Germany and Spain at that time.
I hope that Chinese students in Germany and German students in China agree with my view.
– Harald Brüning
*https://fortune.com/
** https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/wirtschaft-verantwortung/interview-botschafter-ken-wu-china-ist-kein-risiko-li.377993
