“When I came to office, the conventional wisdom was that China would inevitably surpass the United States,” he said. “No one’s saying that now.”
The Biden administration has championed legislation to address the loss of American manufacturing jobs shed over decades, an erosion that came to a head in the 2016 US election and helped propel Trump to victory.
That history has made China a driving factor in many of Biden’s initiatives, even when the country is not mentioned.
A significant number of those jobs vanished in a handful of “swing states” – including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – widely expected to determine the outcome of the November 5 election, as they had in the past two presidential races.
Trump in the 2016 campaign made China’s trade surplus with the US and accusations that Beijing deliberately sought to hollow out America’s manufacturing base a central part of his messaging.
The rhetoric translated into a trade war that Trump formally launched in 2018 plus a turn away from multilateral trade deals, a stance Biden adopted after winning the White House in 2020, and which his US Trade Representative Katherine Tai calls a “worker-centric” approach to trade negotiations and policy.
Keeping with a populist, pro-union message, Biden reiterated a claim that nearly 800,000 new manufacturing jobs have been created in America since he took office.
According to PolitiFact, a non-partisan fact-checking website, the number is largely accurate, but should take into account that “the first three-quarters of those job gains” represented a return to levels immediately before the Covid-19 pandemic.
“With every new job, with every new factory, pride and hope is being brought back to communities throughout the country that were left behind,” he told the cheering crowd. “Now you’re back once again, proving that Wall Street didn’t build America. The middle class built America and … unions built the middle class.”
US President Joe Biden speaks during a walk-through at the United Centre ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, on Monday. Photo: Reuters
That stance has kept Biden’s administration reluctant to negotiate into the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership. Instead, the president has pushed his Indo-Pacific Economic Framework to bolster economic engagement with China’s neighbours, an initiative that has drawn criticism for its lack of any tariff reduction measures.
Aiming to bring manufacturing back stateside, Biden in 2022 signed the Inflation Reduction Act, a wide-ranging law that invests in domestic industries while also promoting America’s transition to clean energy. The law dovetails with Washington’s efforts to remove Chinese companies from the supply chain for these technologies.
Biden also in 2022 signed into law the Chips and Science Act, earmarking US$53 billion in subsidies for US-based chip makers and prohibiting beneficiaries from significantly expanding semiconductor manufacturing capacity in “foreign countries of concern”, including China, for 10 years.
“How can we be the strongest nation in the world without leading the world in science and technology. After years of importing 90 per cent of our semiconductor chips from abroad … private companies from around the world are now investing literally tens of billions of dollars to build new chip factories right here in America,” Biden said in his speech.
Acting on national-security apprehensions as well as anticipation that Beijing would try to export its way out of a systemic economic slowdown, Biden has signed executive orders restricting the sale of cutting-edge semiconductors and other advanced technology to China and slapping a 100 per cent tariff on Chinese EVs.
Taken together, these efforts amount to “a real experiment in trying to slow China’s access to emerging American technologies”, said Dennis Wilder of the Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University.
“Too many American technologies have been given away to China … and there is a need to get our companies thinking far more about the security of their intellectual property and create government laws that really restrict some of these areas,” said Wilder, who served as the National Security Council’s director for China in the George W. Bush administration.
US President Joe Biden poses for a selfie with guests following an event to celebrate the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act at the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on September 13, 2022. Photo: Reuters
However, Wilder noted, the 100 per cent tariff on Chinese EVs and other efforts to completely block Chinese products “is beyond what’s called for”.
“There is obviously the question of dumping … but there’s also, on the other side, the fact that an excellent EV is being made and we can move much faster on climate issues by giving many more Americans the ability to buy them,” he said.
“I’m unsympathetic to huge American auto companies who have had every opportunity to get in this game, and if they want to get in this game, I think joint ventures are a great idea,” Wilder added.
While Biden spent much of his time drawing distinctions with Trump on abortion, racial animosity and other domestic cultural issues, on the foreign policy front, he suggested that their differences on foreign policy brought Nato back from the brink of extinction.
“When Trump left office, Europe and Nato were in tatters. [Trump’s] ‘America First’ doctrine changed our whole image in the world,” Biden told the crowd in Chicago, adding that he spent some 190 hours during the early part of his administration working with European leaders to strengthen the defence bloc.
Chinese electric robotaxis wait outside Wuhan Tianhe International Airport in Hubei province in July. Photo: Bloomberg
Biden also accused the former president of kowtowing to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and said Harris would stick with his hardline stance against the Kremlin’s war on neighbouring Ukraine, now in its third year.
The president has been one of the world’s strongest proponents for the defence of Ukraine, and worked with US lawmakers to get an aid package worth some US$60 billion dollars for the country passed earlier this year.
“Just as no commander-in-chief should ever bow down to dictators the way Trump bows down to Putin, I never have and I promise you Kamala Harris will never do it.”
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