China should not be election issue
In terms of America’s current relationship with China, we are now virtually in the nursery school teacher’s range of “does not play well with others.” To borrow the title of my old friend John Stockwell’s book, we seem to be “In Search of Enemies.”
There is some indication President Donald Trump, in spite of Republican president Richard M. Nixon’s foreign affairs renown for having opened China to the western world, is making the China relationship an issue in his campaign against Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
That, by the way, is a hard hand to play given Mr. Biden’s extensive foreign affairs experience as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then vice president for eight years.
The United States managed to have touchy relations with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union for some 45 years after World War II without ever going to direct warfare. With that record under eight presidents and many Soviet leaders, including Joseph Stalin, it is hard to see why American voters — not to mention its leaders — should get steamed up about Chinese activities in the South China Sea or East China Sea. It’s not as if the Chinese were claiming territories in the Gulf of Mexico or Chesapeake Bay or they were selling jet warplanes to an American separatist movement based on Nantucket or at Fort Sumter.
Japan, the world’s third-largest economy after the United States and China, is able to maintain a relatively stable economic and even political relationship with China. It is not as if relations between the two rival East Asian powers have been smooth in modern times. Japan invaded China in the 1930s and established an independent puppet government in Manchuria, northern China. Japan’s forces defeated China’s thoroughly and were a vicious occupying enemy.
Nonetheless, even given the bitter history between the two countries, relations between them are decent and careful.
For the United States, it would be foolish to let the nature of U.S. relations with China become an important, visible election issue between Democrats and Republicans.
America needs good relations with China, apart from the ambitions of Chinese President Xi Jinping or President Trump or Mr. Biden. The post-coronavirus states of the two economies will serve as the proof of that contention. We need Chinese exports. Try living for just one month notbuying anything made in China.
China needs to make and sell that stuff in order for Mr. Xi’s Chinese Communist Party government to continue to deliver to the restless, divided Chinese population the improving life they expect.
Good relations with China should not be trivialized by getting batted around in the American electoral campaign.
A contest that turned on who gets along better with Mr. Xi would be sad, to say the least. He is trying to trash Hong Kong and has locked up thousands of minority Uighur Muslims in re-education camps in the west of China, which makes him hard to love.
Good relations with each other make unquestionable sense for both countries.