The first presidential debate between President Trump and Joe Biden will take place on Tuesday. There are six topics listed for the debate, and China isn’t one of them.
China is the reason for two of the topics listed — COVID-19 and the economy that was wrecked by the pandemic. China’s lies were parroted by the very World Health Organization that Biden has promised to rejoin if he’s elected president. Biden and the Democratic Party are content to absolve the Chinese Communist Party of blame for the pandemic, while Trump has repeatedly sung the praises of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
China is currently building more detention centers in Xinjiang. In these concentration camps, Uighur Muslims are being tortured and are forced into abortions and sterilization. The New York Times has recently reported that the CCP is destroying mosques and religious shrines in Xinjiang in an effort to erase the religion and culture of the Uighurs completely.
Meanwhile, major U.S. companies continue to bend to China’s influence. Disney praised the Chinese security forces who are heavily involved in the Xinjiang concentration camps after shooting some of their Mulan remake there. Netflix is poised to adapt a Chinese science fiction book trilogy into a series, while the trilogy’s author has praised the concentration camps. The NBA and Big Tech companies have done their share of kowtowing as well.
Meanwhile, the Chinese-owned app TikTok is being forced by the Trump administration to divest from its parent company ByteDance if it wants to avoid being banned in the United States. Biden hasn’t weighed in on the app publicly, but his campaign has told its staffers to remove the app from their devices.
Meanwhile, China has crushed the freedom of the people of Hong Kong, and it is now threatening to do the same thing to Taiwan. Trump has been inconsistent at best on Hong Kong, and Biden’s weakness on China looms large over Taiwan. The winner of this election will also have to determine whether the U.S. attends the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
The president will have to deal with all of these issues posed by China, whether it’s in Trump’s second term or Biden’s first. This is not some eggheaded foreign policy question — the actions of China have led to over 200,000 dead from the coronavirus, millions more thrown into unemployment, and spikes in drug usage and depression. Hollywood studios and athletes are running with Chinese propaganda to cash Chinese checks. One would think that warrants a passing mention at the first presidential debate.
