Biden’s State of the Union address used to bolster election race: expert

Chinese experts described US President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address as being “of poor quality” and “out of tune” as it sought to bolster his election campaign instead of talking about policies to make US development healthier and more stable.

Biden delivered the final State of the Union of his first term on Thursday night (local time), in a speech packed with 2024 campaign themes and contrasts he plans to highlight in the eight months before Americans decide whether to give him – or Donald Trump – four more years in the White House, US media outlet NBS News reported.

According to recent NBC News polling, Biden went into the speech with an exceptionally low approval rating of 37 percent.

When referring to China, Biden claimed, “Frankly, for all his [Trump’s] tough talk on China, it never occurred to my predecessor to do that.”

“We should say this State of the Union address is of poor quality,” said Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University. “Instead of talking about real policies to make the US healthier and more stable, it sought to bolster his election race, which makes this State of the Union out of tune,” Li criticized.

Domestic economic issues were the key focus of Biden’s address, in which he tried to boast about his achievements in an attempt to belittle China’s economic development.

“For years, all I’ve heard from my Republican friends and so many others is China’s on the rise and America is falling behind. They’ve got it backward. America is rising. We have the best economy in the world,” Biden said.

But Chinese experts debunked his bragging.

Although GDP growth in the US rose to 2.5 percent in 2023, the figure hides some very dangerous data – decline in investment, which shows that people who control capital in the US are not optimistic about its economic development, said Lü Xiang, research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.