Two weeks after taking office, President Joe Biden went to the State Department to deliver a speech on his foreign policy.
One point he repeatedly emphasized in that speech: he would not leave the People’s Republic of China take advantage of the United States.
“American leadership must face this new momentum of the rise of authoritarianism, including China’s growing ambitions to rival the United States,” Biden said at the beginning of his speech.
“We must begin with diplomacy rooted in America’s most cherished democratic values: defend liberty, defend opportunity, defend universal rights, respect the rule of law, and address all people with dignity,” Biden said.
“And we will also face directly the challenges posed to our prosperity, security, and democratic values by our most serious competitor, China,” Biden declared.
“We will confront the economic abuses of Chi at; counter its aggressive and coercive action; to repel China’s assault on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance,” he said.
So Biden focused specifically on the well-being of the American working class—including how that related to US relations with China.
“Every action we take in our conduct abroad, we must consider working American families,” Biden said. “Advancing a foreign policy for the middle class requires an urgent focus on our domestic economic renewal.”
“If we invest in ourselves and our people,” said Biden, “if we fight to ensure that If American companies are positioned to compete and win on the global stage, if the rules of international trade are not against us, if our workers and intellectual property are protected, then there is no country on Earth – not China or anyone else – that can equal us.”
So, as Biden did in his strategic goals of “curbing China’s assault on human rights” and keeping “American working families top of mind” in every action that the United States perform abroad?
The State Department’s 2021 report on human rights in China described the Chinese regime’s systematic attacks on human rights of the Chinese people.
“Genocide and crimes against humanity have occurred during the year against predominantly Muslim Uighurs and members of other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjian,” the State Department said. “These crimes continued and included: arbitrary arrest or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians; forced sterilization, forced abortions, and more restrictive enforcement of the country’s birth control policies; rape; torture of a large number of arbitrarily detainees; forced labour; and draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression and freedom of movement.”
“Government officials and security services often committed abuses with impunity,” the report concluded.
While China continued to inflict these abuses on its own people, it also continued to run up a huge trade surplus with the United States.
In 2021, according to the Census Bureau, the United States exported only $
, billion in products to China, while imported US$ 504, 935 billion. As a result, the United States had a bilateral trade deficit of $
,493 billion in one year.
So far in 2022, the Census Bureau has published international trade figures for the nine months from January to September.
But things have not improved in US-China trade relations. They got worse.
In the first nine months of 2021 (when the US was on track for that
