Stop Saying Biden Is “A Lot like Trump” on China

“All the headlines about how we will see a continuation of President Trump’s China policies under a potential Biden administration ignore their radically divergent views about the United States’ role in the world.”

During the Republican Party primary in 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump declared that “we can’t continue to allow China to rape our country.” At a rally two weeks ago, President Trump told the crowd, “This election is a simple choice: if Biden wins, China wins.” But it is hard to see what Americans have “won” after four years of economic warfare and rapidly deteriorating relations with Beijing.

From the beginning, President Trump announced that his administration would fundamentally alter the U.S.-China relationship to address issues such as Chinese currency manipulation, export subsidies, encroachments on intellectual property rights, and the United States’ trade deficit with the second largest economy in the world. When he was unable to secure any meaningful progress on these goals in his first year, he imposed tariffs on more than half a trillion dollars in Chinese goods, which prompted Beijing to respond with $185 billion in tariffs of its own.

A January, 2020 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that the brunt of “U.S. tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by U.S. firms and consumers.” The NBER report was consistent with numerous other studies; for example, Moody’s Analytics found that the trade war led to a 0.3% contraction of real GDP and a loss of almost 300,000 jobs. The negative effects of the trade war on the United States’ economy are clear: lower profits for American companies, higher prices for consumers, and especially devastating effects for certain parts of the economy, such as the agriculture sector.