The Big Issue That Unites Harris And Trump: China Is Enemy No. 1

-Analysis-

If this story were a joke, it would be a rather lackluster one: Recently, the Associated Press reported that thousands of Bibles sold by Donald Trump this year, marked with “God Bless the USA,” were printed in China — the same country Trump has labeled as the United States’ greatest enemy for years. AP reported that each Bible cost $3 to produce — far less than the hefty retail price of at least $59.99.

“The dude outsourced God to China,” quipped Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ running mate, at a Michigan event. Former President Barack Obama, heavily involved in the Democratic campaign over the past few weeks, has already raised this issue in several speeches. “Mr. Tough Guy on China except when it comes to making a few bucks,” Obama exclaimed indignantly.

The most interesting thing about this story, however, is not Trump’s hypocrisy — the most recent in a very long list — nor the Democrats’ criticism — that’s just electioneering. What is remarkable is the political climate that this incident highlights.

In the United States, an increasingly obsessive anti-China stance has prevailed in recent years. And this obsession is bipartisan. The anti-China consensus is primarily a result of the obvious economic and geopolitical competition between the two countries, which are by far the largest industrial nations in the world.

They fight over who produces what and who is in charge where. But this paranoid and shrill attitude toward China echoes something else, something deeper, a special characteristic of the American psyche.

Searching for a scapegoat

The American political establishment is affronted by no longer being the unchallenged hegemon. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, they likely anticipated a unipolar world where the U.S. would reign as the lone superpower. In many ways, China now occupies the role the Soviet Union once held: ideological adversary, scapegoat, a blank canvas for projection — a rival shaping America’s own identity, uniting both left and right.

The extent to which Democrats and Republicans agree on their position on China was also made clear in the TV debate between Harris and Trump in September. Trump boasted that he had taken “billions of dollars” from Chinese GDP through tariffs, and claimed that China was afraid of him.

Harris, in turn, accused Trump of selling American computer chips to China and thus “betraying” his own country. The United States’ China policy should only have one goal, Harris explained, namely “to win the race for the 21st century.” On no other issue are the two sides this close.

China, the true culprit for the misery of the American working class.

The same week as the presidential debate took place, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a total of 25 legislative initiatives, all aimed to curb China’s presence and influence in the United States. China must be “countered with all available means,” said Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Though this “China Week” in Congress was a Republican initiative, Democrats joined in.

Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois even argued that the measures weren’t “tough enough,” stressing that the opioid fentanyl, fueling an overdose epidemic in the U.S., often comes from China. The Chinese Communist Party, Krishnamoorthi added, exploits the “fairness” of America’s system — a point other Democratic politicians have echoed.

When Tim Ryan wanted to become Senator for Ohio in 2022, he built his entire election campaign on “one word,” as he himself said: China, the true culprit for the misery of the American working class.

Old friends, new roles

Barely a week goes by without an American think tank or news outlet debating the “new Cold War” with China. Podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan, a major media figure, broached the topic on his recent Netflix show, complaining that “our enemies produce our smartphones.” Right-wing American media, in particular, frame it as a clash between “freedom and tyranny,” good and evil. This rhetoric profoundly influences American society: According to surveys, more than 80% of Americans now view China unfavorably.

This anti-Chinese sentiment has a long and worrying history in America. In the 19th century, various massacres against Chinese communities took place in cities such as Los Angeles and Denver. In the great wars of the 20th century, the U.S. and China were sometimes allies, sometimes enemies.

From the 1970s onward, relations gradually normalized: Many will remember the pictures of U.S. President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to his Chinese counterpart, Mao Zedong. Back then, China was set to become a useful ally against the Soviet Union, and an increasingly important economic partner. Yet the roles were clear: The United States would be the boss, China was to be the apprentice.

The U.S. government is behaving like a child who has not yet learned how to deal with defeat.

Today, things are completely different. The People’s Republic has long since overtaken the United States in many areas of global economy as Xi Jinping, who is both Chinese president and Communist Party leader, pushed his agenda of state-controlled capitalism.

This applies not only to “old industries,” such as the manufacture of combustion engines, the production of steel and the construction of coal-fired power plants but, more worryingly, to cutting-edge future technologies. China produces more electric cars than the U.S., more solar panels, more wind turbines, more semiconductors and more batteries. It invests more money in artificial intelligence and processes 80% of the most valuable raw materials.

The days of double-digit growth rates may be over, but the pace of the Chinese economy is still completely different than the one we see in the U.S. and other large industrialized countries.

“It is not easy for the West to accept this, but when it comes to climate policy, we are not the decisive factor,” economic historian Adam Tooze recently wrote on Zeit Online, in an article called “The future of humanity lies largely in China’s hands.”

The United States’ difficulty in coping with this new reality is particularly evident in its over-the-top trade policy. Both countries had moderate customs laws for a long time, but now America is getting ready to wage a trade war.

There is no conspiracy

When Trump first imposed tariffs on Chinese goods in 2018, some saw it as the whim of a nationalist zealot with protectionist nostalgia. Trump has been a big fan of tariffs ever since the 1980s, when he wanted them to be aimed at Japanese products.

In recent years, however, Trump’s protectionist policies have become the standard approach in Washington D.C. In some cases, the Biden administration has increased tariffs on Chinese products massively. For Chinese electric cars, tariffs are now 100%. Numerous economists warn that this strategy hardly allows the creation of any domestic jobs, and increases consumer prices: It might ultimately do more harm than good to the American population.

The U.S. government is behaving like a child who has not yet learned how to deal with defeat. Biden’s climate envoy, John Podesta, complained in the spring that China was distorting the global market for green energy through state-led overproduction and unfair practices.

China is being punished not for its political failure but for its economic success.

But as the business magazine Bloomberg recently discovered in an investigation into solar energy, China’s lead is not the result of a conspiracy: It follows simple capitalist logic. Chinese companies are performing better not because of some shady secret plot: They are simply investing more and driving innovation. Backed by the government, that’s for sure. But that happens in the United States, too.

“It is obvious that China is being punished not for its political failure but for its economic success,” writes economics professor J.W. Mason, referring to the U.S. tariff policy. And experts warn that such a trade war makes a military conflict more likely.

In any case, the tone in American politics and administration is becoming increasingly bellicist. In July, the U.S. Congress’ Commission on the National Defense Strategy stated that China had “largely negated the U.S.’s military advantage.”

Double standards

One could argue that America’s anti-China stance is justified by Xi’s authoritarianism, troubling Uighur oppression, crackdown on dissent, and military maneuvers near Taiwan. And there are valid reasons to criticize the Chinese social media giant TikTok, too. But the truth is that nothing so far seems to justify America’s anti-China fixation entirely, and many reasons for hostility almost feel like pretexts.

First, the United States itself is a master of repressive politics — just look at the record-breaking penal system with its 2 million or so prisoners. The country has a long history of unscrupulous land seizures and invasions — just look at any history book. And with X under Elon Musk, the United States hosts a social media platform that is politically more than shady.

The U.S. is no longer capable of asserting its power everywhere.

All of this does not make the United States an authoritarian and undemocratic state on a par with China. But it is obvious that the American public applies standards to its geopolitical opponents that it is far more hesitant to apply to itself — and that it does not apply such standards that don’t suit it. The U.S. government is hardly bothered by human rights violations and war crimes in allied countries: If it were, its foreign policy towards Egypt or Israel, for example, would have to be very different.

Measured against its self-image of being the “leader of the free world,” the United States fails again and again. The catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan has recently shown that the U.S. is no longer capable of asserting its power everywhere. The discrepancy between its claim to be the world’s police and the failure of its foreign policy is also an insult.

External enemy

But this is having at least one positive effect: After decades of neoliberal austerity, the U.S. government under Biden has again begun to invest in the domestic economy and infrastructure in a substantial way.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed in the summer of 2022 — the largest climate package in U.S. history with 9 billion in green technology investments — was undoubtedly a reaction to China’s rise. In the 0 billion CHIPS and Science Act, which promotes the production of semiconductors and tech research, the White House explicitly said that the measures were intended as a “counter to China.”

The fear of being permanently outdone by China has pushed the U.S. to once again pursue a domestic industrial policy and to be bolder on decarbonization.

Why does American politics always seems to need an external enemy?

At this point, it may seem that the rivalry with China might not be all bad, and may even boost the U.S. politically and economically. After all, the Cold War was a time of prosperity during which the U.S. ultimately achieved exactly what it wanted: to assert its dominance in the world.

But this new confrontation has a number of negative effects that do not fit into this picture. It’s not good news if the green transition that will be necessary in the coming years will happen in a Cold-War scenario, with massive plans of rearmament: the military is one of the biggest emitters.

Furthermore, the question arises as to why American politics always seem to need an external enemy. At least the Democratic Party should have a vision of change that does not involve paranoia and bellicism, a vision that works on its own. Why isn’t there one?

Paranoid politics

The U.S. historian Samuel Moyn examines this default in his book Liberalism Against Itself, which has just been translated into German. Using biographies of various intellectuals, including Judith Shklar, Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt, he describes how liberalism lost its emancipatory and utopian claim from the late 1940s onwards.

In place of a liberalism of “positive freedom,” a “Cold War liberalism” took its place, which was determined by a “fearful, minimalist approach to the preservation of freedom,” Moyn writes. The fixation on Soviet communism made American liberalism bellicist and narrow-minded.

In the United States, there has always been a very long history of politicians cultivating the threat from outside, as historian Richard Hofstadter, for example, pointed out in his 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics. The Cold War solidified this paranoia and made it a national value. Apparently, the “American way of life” talking point works better when it has to be defended against some external enemy.

China is already much larger and more powerful than the Soviet Union ever was.

The fight against the “evil empire,” as U.S. President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union, became the fight against the “axis of evil” after Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. By calling for “war nationalism,” U.S. presidents were often able to increase their popularity, at least in the short term.

This type of “existential enemy” policies have not only contributed to disastrous wars in recent decades, but have also led to massive restrictions on freedom and repression within the United States itself. The surveillance and suppression of left-wing groups, for example, has been documented countless times. And just ask an Arab American what the years after Sept. 11 felt like.

And, apart from all this, can the United States actually succeed in securing hegemony this time around? China is already much larger and more powerful than the Soviet Union ever was. And China will not collapse any time soon, despite all the economic challenges the government in Beijing is facing.

The multipolar world is already a fact. The question is how the United States will react to it.