POLITICO
WHITE HOUSE
Trump says blame China. His supporters are listening.
At rallies, one protester yelled, “Go to China.” In state legislatures, anti-China bills are being proposed. On conservative radio, callers want to punish China over the coronavirus.
Polls conducted for the Trump campaign and Republican senators show China will be an effective issue for Republicans in November. | Evan Vucci, File/AP Photo
The strategy to blame China for the coronavirus outbreak began weeks ago in Washington, D.C. Now it’s spread to the rest of the country.
In Wisconsin, a state senator introduced a bill criticizing “the negligence and hostile actions” of the Chinese government. In Virginia, a conservative talk radio host debated ways the Trump administration could punish China for inflicting a pandemic on the world. And in Colorado, an activist protesting stay-at-home orders confronted a health care worker on a busy street. “Go to China if you want communism!" she yelled. “Go to China.”
President Donald Trump’s decision to focus his coronavirus anger on China, America’s top economic rival, is part of a pivot for Trump’s reelection team as it scrambles to revise a campaign message that had been focused on financial prosperity. Now, with the economy in a coronavirus-induced coma, Trump’s team is working to instead make the 2020 race a referendum on who will be tougher on China — Trump or Joe Biden. In recent days, Trump’s campaign has even dubbed the president’s likely Democrat opponent “Beijing Biden."
The message appears to be resonating. John Fredericks, the Virginia talk radio host and Trump supporter, said his callers, many out of work in rural areas, trust Trump to retaliate against China.
“My callers know what China has done,” he said. “There’s blood on their hands.”
But while Republican pollster Frank Luntz predicted China will be the biggest issue in the presidential campaign, second only to the coronavirus itself, he said it’s not clear the issue will benefit Trump.
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“The question pollsters can’t answer right now is whether this helps Trump or Biden,” Luntz said “More precisely, both candidates will be criticized for past and current comments they’ve made. It’s not clear which candidate will be hurt more by China.”
Indeed, both the Trump and Biden camps seem to think they have a winning hand on China.
Polls conducted for the Trump campaign and Republican senators show China will be an effective issue for Republicans in November, according to three people who have seen the numbers, leading the GOP to buy a flurry of TV and Facebook ads, dash off emails to supporters and increase their tough rhetoric.
“Unlike Sleepy Joe Biden and the rest of the Crooked Democrats, President Trump keeps his promises, which is why we’re not letting China get away with using America as a scapegoat,” one Trump campaign Facebook ad read.
But Biden and the Democrats, too, think focusing on China will lift their chances in November. They’re criticizing Trump for initially praising the country’s response to the pandemic and accusing him of caring more about his trade deal with China than American lives. The Democratic group American Bridge just launched an ad accusing Trump of trusting China.
Both candidates also have perceived weaknesses on the issue.
Biden last year appeared to downplay China as a geopolitical competitor and is fighting claims that the business partners of his son, Hunter, landed a $1.5 billion deal days after they traveled to China on official business when he was vice president, even though there’s no direct evidence of impropriety.
For his part, Trump has wavered repeatedly on China’s culpability for the pandemic. He initially praised the country and its leader, President Xi Jinping, more than a dozen times in the early days of the outbreak, often stressing the recent trade deal the two countries had signed.
Trump later reversed course, though, and started excoriating the country for its handling of the virus. The pivot came as Trump faced criticism that he initially downplayed the outbreak and failed to quickly produce and ship tests and medical supplies to states. America has now passed 1 million coronavirus cases, with more than 60,000 people dying from the disease.
“He understands his presidency rises and falls on the very pandemic he denied was a pandemic and he is desperate to try to counteract the narrative that has set in that he wasn’t up to the job,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who cited coronavirus when he endorsed Biden last month. “That’s a devastating critique. You don’t get re-elected with that narrative.”
In response, Trump has touted the narrative that China, not him, is at fault. It’s a message that plays into American’s current feelings about China. About two-thirds of the country has an unfavorable view of China, the highest number in 15 years, according to a poll by Pew Research Center. That figure is also up nearly 20 percentage points since Trump was inaugurated in 2017.
“The desire for China to be held accountable for the spread of Covid-19 is no longer limited to Trump supporters,” said Brian Swenson, a Republican strategist in Florida who worked for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), referencing the disease that results from the coronavirus. “There is a growing bipartisan call at the local level for China to be held accountable for their lack of transparency with the world community, their spreading of propaganda and misinformation and for failing to diminish the spread of Covid-19.”
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Kyle Hupfer, chairman of the Republican party in the red state of Indiana, said residents expect Trump to get to the bottom of the pandemic. “There’s certainly a level of distrust related to what China has done and how they’re approached this,” he said.
In recent weeks, Trump has tried to take advantage of those growing feelings of animosity — nicknaming the virus the “Chinese virus,” accusing China of lying about its number of cases and boasting he contained the outbreak by restricting travel from China in January, even though many public health experts say the ban merely bought the U.S. time that Trump did not use to prepare adequately.
This week, Trump said his administration was investigating whether China covered up what it knew about the early spread of coronavirus. His aides are discussing ways to penalize the country.
“We are not happy with China,” Trump told reporters Monday. “We are not happy with that whole situation because we believe it could have been stopped at the source, it could have been stopped quickly, and it wouldn’t have spread all over the world. And we think that should have happened.”
Peter Navarro, Trump’s economic adviser, has pushed the president to reduce the government’s dependency on imports from China when it comes to medical supplies and drugs. Trump supporters around the country have latched onto Navarro’s efforts.
“To make America great again, we need to be dependent on ourselves,” said Ralph King, a Trump supporter in Bedford, Ohio, who co-founded the conservative group Main Street Patriots. “We should not be dependent on other countries.”
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Supporters of President Trump are taking up his call when it comes to blaming China.
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Trump’s allies say going after China is a particularly compelling issue for the president because he constantly criticized Beijing while on the campaign trail in 2016, accusing the country of taking U.S. jobs, spying on U.S. businesses and stealing U.S. technology.
“He should stay on the message he has had for many years,” said a Republican who speaks to Trump.
So far, Trump’s surrogates and aides have stayed on that message, talking about China daily in online campaign events. America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC, released a new TV ad attacking Biden on China Friday in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania
In the coming weeks, Trump’s campaign is expected to launch a similar ad blitz.
“Our internal data shows that Joe Biden’s softness on China is a major vulnerability, among many,” said Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh, though he declined to release the polling numbers.
There are growing signs Trump’s strategy is working.
Last week, Missouri became the first state to sue the Chinese government for its role in the pandemic, accusing it of failing to warn other nations of the virus and allowing people to travel outside the country, among other things. Mississippi followed with its own suit.
Legislators in other states are considering their own actions while some conservative activists protesting stay-at-home orders are mentioning China.
Some Republican senators, including Rubio, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, have pushed for additional actions to hit China. Rubio wants to halt China’s hold on the pharmaceutical supply chain. Hawley wants to prove the virus started in Wuhan, China. And Cotton wants to ensure Americans can sue Chinese officials for the pandemic.
Senate Republican strategists also recently distributed a memo advising GOP candidates to focus on China and blame the country for covering up the virus, accuse Democrats of being “soft on China” and stress that Republicans will push to sanction Beijing.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis is encouraging medical companies to stop doing business with China and has explored divesting the state’s interests out of China. He wants everyone to know he’s tough on China — just like Trump.
“I have not forgotten about China,” DeSantis told reporters recently. “In fact, some of you guys may want to look this up, but there was a Chinese Communist Party think tank that did a report in February, and they analyzed the governors in the United States — who was hardline, who was friendly and who was unknown. There were five governors that were hardline against China. Where do you think I was?”
Arek Sarkissian contributed to this report.
Europe has been ’naive’ about China, EU official says
© 2020 POLITICO LLC
May 3, 2020Updated 9:08 a.m. ET
BRUSSELS — Australia has called for an inquiry into the origin of the virus. Germany and Britain are hesitating anew about inviting in the Chinese tech giant Huawei. President Trump has blamed China for the contagion and is seeking to punish it. Some governments want to sue Beijing for damages and reparations.
Across the globe a backlash is building against China for its initial mishandling of the crisis that helped loose the coronavirus on the world, creating a deeply polarizing battle of narratives and setting back China’s ambition to fill the leadership vacuum left by the United States.
China, never receptive to outside criticism and wary of damage to its domestic control and long economic reach, has responded aggressively, combining medical aid to other countries with harsh nationalist rhetoric, and mixing demands for gratitude with economic threats.
The result has only added momentum to the blowback and the growing mistrust of China in Europe and Africa, undermining China’s desired image as a generous global actor.
A group of Chinese doctors inspecting a makeshift hospital in Belgrade. China has been showering European countries with millions of masks, test kits and other aid, recasting itself as the hero in the battle against the coronavirus.Credit…Oliver Bunic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Even before the virus, Beijing displayed a fierce approach to public relations, an aggressive style called “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, named after two ultrapatriotic Chinese films featuring the evil plots and fiery demise of American-led foreign mercenaries.
With clear encouragement from President Xi Jinping and the powerful Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party, a younger generation of Chinese diplomats have been proving their loyalty with defiantly nationalist and sometimes threatening messages in the countries where they are based.
A video screen in Beijing in March showing President Xi Jinping of China with army officers and other officials.Credit…Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times
“You have a new brand of Chinese diplomats who seem to compete with each other to be more radical and eventually insulting to the country where they happen to be posted,” said François Godement, a senior adviser for Asia at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne. “They’ve gotten into fights with every northern European country with whom they should have an interest, and they’ve alienated every one of them.”
Since the virus, the tone has only toughened, a measure of just how serious a danger China’s leaders consider the virus to their standing at home, where it has fueled anger and destroyed economic growth, as well as abroad.
In the past several weeks, at least seven Chinese ambassadors — to France, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and the African Union — have been summoned by their hosts to answer accusations ranging from spreading misinformation to the “racist mistreatment” of Africans in Guangzhou.
Chinese flags lining a street in Guangzhou, where Africans say they have been evicted and forced into quarantine.Credit…Alex Plavevski/EPA, via Shutterstock
Just last week, China threatened to withhold medical aid from the Netherlands for changing the name of its representative office in Taiwan to include the word Taipei. And before that, the Chinese Embassy in Berlin sparred publicly with the German newspaper Bild after the tabloid demanded $160 billion in compensation from China for damages to Germany from the virus.
Mr. Trump said last week that his administration was conducting “serious investigations” into Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
He has pressed American intelligence agencies to find the source of the virus, suggesting it might have emerged accidentally from a Wuhan weapons lab, although most intelligence agencies remain skeptical. And he has expressed interest in trying to sue Beijing for damages, with the United States seeking $10 million for every American death.
Republicans in the United States have moved to support Mr. Trump’s attacks on China. Missouri’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to hold Beijing responsible for the outbreak.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, called the suit “frivolous,” adding that it had “no factual and legal basis’’ and “only invites ridicule.”
Attorney General Eric Schmitt of Missouri has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to hold Beijing responsible for the coronavirus outbreak.Credit…Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press
The suit seems to aim less at securing victory in court, which is unlikely, than at prodding Congress to pass legislation to make it easier for U.S. citizens to sue foreign states for damages.
“From Beijing’s point of view, this contemporary call is a historic echo of the reparations paid after the Boxer Rebellion,” said Theresa Fallon, director of the Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies, referring to the anti-imperialist, anti-Christian and ultranationalist uprising around 1899-1901 in China that ended in defeat, with huge reparations for eight nations over the next decades. “The party’s cultivation of the humiliation narrative makes it politically impossible for Xi to ever agree to pay any reparations.”
Instead, it has been imperative for Mr. Xi to turn the narrative around, steering it from a story of incompetence and failure — including the suppression of early warnings about the virus — into one of victory over the illness, a victory achieved through the unity of the party.
In the latest iteration of the new Chinese narrative, the enemy — the virus — did not even come from China, but from the U.S. military, an unsubstantiated accusation made by China’s combative Foreign Ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian.
Chinese diplomats are encouraged to be combative by Beijing, said Susan Shirk, a China scholar and director of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego. The promotion of Mr. Zhao to spokesman and his statement about the U.S. Army “signals to everyone in China that this is the official line, so you get this megaphone effect,” she said, adding that it makes any negotiations more difficult.
But in the longer run, China is seeding mistrust and damaging its own interests, said Ms. Shirk, who is working on a book called “Overreach,” about how China’s domestic politics have derailed its ambitions for a peaceful rise as a global superpower.
“As China started getting control over the virus and started this health diplomacy, it could have been the opportunity for China to emphasize its compassionate side and rebuild trust and its reputation as a responsible global power,” she said. “But that diplomatic effort got hijacked by the Propaganda Department of the party, with a much more assertive effort to leverage their assistance to get praise for China as a country and a system and its performance in stopping the spread of the virus.”
In recent days, Chinese state media has run numerous inflammatory statements, saying that Australia, after announcing its desire for an inquiry into the virus, was “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe.” Beijing warned that Australia risked long-term damage to its trading partnership with China, which takes a third of Australia’s exports.
“Maybe the ordinary people will say, ‘Why should we drink Australian wine? Eat Australian beef?’” China’s ambassador, Cheng Jingye, told The Australian Financial Review. Australia’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, dismissed China’s attempt as “economic coercion.”
The Sydney waterfront. Chinese state media recently assailed Australia, after it announced its desire for an inquiry into the virus.Credit…Matthew Abbott for The New York Times
Even in European countries like Germany, “the mistrust of China has accelerated so quickly with the virus that no ministry knows how to deal with it,” said Angela Stanzel, a China expert with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
In Germany, as in Britain, in addition to new questions about the advisability of using Huawei for new 5G systems, worries have also grown about dependency on China for vital materials and pharmaceuticals.
France, which traditionally has good relations with Beijing, has also been angered by critical statements by Chinese diplomats, including a charge that the French had deliberately left their older residents to die in nursing homes. That prompted a rebuke from France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, and anger from legislators, despite an early reciprocal exchange of medical aid like masks.
Recently, the German government complained that Chinese diplomats were soliciting letters of support and gratitude for Beijing’s aid and efforts against the virus from government officials and the heads of major German companies.
The same has been true in Poland, said the U.S. ambassador to Warsaw, Georgette Mosbacher, in an interview, describing Chinese pressure on President Andrzej Duda to call Mr. Xi and thank him for aid, a call the Chinese heralded at home.
“Poland wasn’t going to get this stuff unless the phone call was made, so they could use that phone call” for propaganda, Ms. Mosbacher said.
There is some unhappiness in China with the current diplomatic rhetoric. In a recent essay, Zi Zhongyun, now 89, a longtime expert on America at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, sees parallels in the harsh nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric of the Wolf Warriors of today with the period around the Boxer Rebellion against Western influence in China.
Ms. Zi said such reactions risked getting out of hand.
“I can say without a doubt,” she concluded, “that as long as Boxer-like activities are given the official stamp of approval as being ‘patriotic,’” and as long as “generation after generation of our fellow Chinese are educated and inculcated with a Boxer-like mentality, it will be impossible for China to take its place among the modern civilized nations of the world.”
Isabella Kwai contributed reporting from Sydney, Australia. Monika Pronczuk contributed research from Brussels.
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{Note : the same old story : }