President Trump’s reelection campaign has two main targets, Joe Biden and China, and plans to tie them together relentlessly until November.
Team Trump is preparing to make the former vice president’s remarks and familial ties to the communist country a focal point of its campaign strategy. The political ammunition is extensive, with years of video and recorded speeches reminding people of what the campaign calls Biden’s coziness with Beijing.
And it comes at a time when the Trump administration is increasingly pointing fingers at China as the source of the coronavirus pandemic. The disease was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, and has since spread globally. More than 2.16 million cases have been reported across 201 countries and territories, resulting in more than 145,000 deaths, including 34,784 in the United States.
Those close to the Trump campaign say internal polling suggests it’s one of Biden’s biggest weaknesses.
“Joe Biden has a big China problem. Our data shows that Biden’s softness on China is a major vulnerability, among many,” Trump campaign Communications Director Tim Murtaugh told the Washington Examiner.
As vice president, Biden lavished praise on China during a state visit in August 2011. Biden, a Delaware senator from 1973-2009, said he’d been impressed with the country since he traveled there decades ago after the two countries normalized relations.
“Let me be clear: I believed in 1979 and said so then, and I believe now that a rising China is a positive development not only for the people of China but for the United States and the world as a whole,” Biden said.
During that speech, when discussing the U.S. budget, the then-vice president emphasized that he wasn’t passing judgment on China’s decadeslong authoritarian “one-child” policy, which strictly enforced family restrictions.
“As I was talking with some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China. You have no safety net. Your policy has been one, which I fully understand and I’m not second-guessing, of one child per family,” Biden said.
Biden claimed that “it is in our self-interest that China continue to prosper” because “a more prosperous China will mean more demand for American-made goods and services and more jobs back home in the United States of America.”
Those remarks were echoed six months later in a February speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, amid he and President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.
“Let me be clear: I believe, as the president said also to the vice president in the Oval Office not long ago,” he said, referencing then-Vice President Xi Jinping, China’s current ruler. “We believe that a rising China is a positive development not only for China but also for the United States and the world.”
More recently, Biden was hammered by the Trump campaign and other Republicans for seemingly downplaying the economic threat posed by China.
“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” Biden said in Iowa City, Iowa, in May 2019. “They can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system.”
He added: “They’re not bad folks, folks. … They’re not competition for us.”
Democrats, in response, point to the Trump family’s overseas business dealings and the president’s praise for China, most recently over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
“Trump spent vital weeks praising China’s response as successful and transparent while deceiving the American people about the extreme threat we faced and failing to prepare our country,” said Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates. “China played Donald Trump for a sucker, and now, all of us are paying an atrocious price for his malpractice with over 30,000 American lives taken by this outbreak, infections climbing, and our economy in a nosedive.”
But Biden’s comments remain fodder for the Trump campaign.
In January, Biden dismissed the economic threat posed by China again, comparing it to fears about Japan’s growing economy in the 1980s.
“We talk about China as our competitor? We should be helping and benefiting ourselves by doing that,” Biden said. “But the idea that China is going to eat our lunch? It was like I remember debates in the late ’90s — remember Japan was gonna own us? Give me a break.”
Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has also come into the crosshairs of the Trump campaign.
Hunter Biden promised in October 2019 that he would resign from the board of BHR Partners, a Chinese investment firm. The Daily Caller reported this week that business records showed he was still listed on the board. Hunter’s lawyer produced a letter on Friday from BHR Partners CEO Jonathan Li, dated Friday, stating Hunter did resign last year. Hunter has promised no foreign business dealings if his father wins in 2020.
When Patrick Ho, a high-ranking Chinese businessman, was charged by the Justice Department with global corruption in 2017, the first call he made after his arrest was to Joe Biden’s brother James Biden, who thought the call was meant for Hunter Biden.
Ho, a lieutenant to the founder of the multibillion-dollar Chinese conglomerate CEFC China Energy, was indicted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in 2017 for a bribery scheme aimed at government officials in Africa, assisting Iranian sanctions evasion, and using the Chinese company’s connections to sell weaponry to Chad, Libya, and Qatar.
Hunter Biden agreed to represent Ho as part of his efforts to work out a liquefied natural gas deal worth tens of millions of dollars with CEFC China Energy’s leader Ye Jianming, who had ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
The lucrative deal fell apart when Ye disappeared after being detained by Chinese authorities in 2018. Ho was sentenced to three years in federal prison last March.
Kathleen Biden, Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, accused him in divorce filings of “spending extravagantly on his own interests … while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.” The filing also discusses a “large” diamond, worth $80,000, he claimed he no longer had. In a later interview, Hunter Biden said the diamond, which he claimed was only worth $10,000, was a gift from Ye.
“What would they be bribing me for? My dad wasn’t in office,” Hunter Biden told the New Yorker. “I knew it wasn’t a good idea to take it. I just felt like it was weird.”
