With New Crackdown, Biden Wages Global Campaign on Chinese Technology

This election, President Donald Trump has two main strategies for winning the White House. One is to convince voters that he and his administration are pro-Americans. The other is to make China look like an angry, unfair country that must be brought to heel. That is the strategy that Vice President Joseph Biden has selected as his latest campaign line: how to contain technology that is spreading so fast that countries like China and Russia have come to distrust it.

The vice president has been working since the early 2000s to make the Chinese Communist Party look like a bully, not a responsible leader of a country in transition. He and his chief of staff at the time, Rahm Emanuel, came to believe it was possible not just for Beijing to be the world’s bully, but to be a bully that could also be a partner in the world’s future.

Since coming to office in 2009, China has become the United States’ major economic competitor. Since 2017, trade between the two countries has risen to more than $300 billion a year. China’s foreign reserves have more than doubled since Trump took office to $3.2 trillion, its largest dollar reserves ever. And in his first few months in office, Trump has launched trade wars with five countries while increasing tariffs on Chinese imports.

Even Obama’s former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, who now heads ExxonMobil, acknowledged that relations between the two countries are now “in tatters.”

“People always say that what happens to China is a short-term issue for the United States,” Tillerson said, according to CNBC. “What has been true, is for China.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has attacked China for its trade practices. Back in the early 1990s, for instance, he blamed then-President George H.W. Bush for letting China off the hook during an economic dispute. The Chinese government, for its part, blamed America’s support of the Vietnam War for the collapse of its economy