Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders applauded the Chinese government’s anti-poverty programs in an answer to a question about tensions between the country and the United States during an interview aired Tuesday.
“They’re a country that vigorously protects their own interests,” the Vermont senator said in an interview with The Hill. “But what we have to say about China, in fairness to China and its leadership, is if I’m not mistaken, they have made more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization, okay? So they’ve done a lot of things for their people.”
Sanders later went on to talk about a potentially healthy relationship between the US and China should he be elected president and slammed China’s entry into the World Trade Organization as a “trade agreement written by large profitable corporations who wanted cheap labor.”
Over the years, Sanders has repeatedly praised authoritarian and communist regimes. During his career as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders held a self-described “honeymoon,” with his wife Jane in the Soviet Union.
“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing. In other countries people don’t line up for food: The rich get food and the poor starve to death,” Sanders said in 1985.
