Here’s 23 Questions Joe Biden Needs To Answer About China

Will Biden disavow his decades of support for China’s rise and follow Trump’s lead?

By Ben Weingarten May 29, 2020

Communist China poses a greater threat to America and our interests abroad than any other nation in the world.  If it wasn’t clear prior to the spread of the Chinese coronavirus, resulting largely from the Chinese Communist Party’s Chernobyl-like response, the subsequent threats should crystallize this point. It has acted malevolently toward the U.S., our European and Anglosphere allies, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and India, and across the South China Sea.

 Countering the CCP is essential to preserving American life, limb, and liberty. The public deserves to know what presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s approach to China would be.

After all, this is a man who sat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for three decades. Biden ultimately chaired or served as its ranking member from 1997 on, during a career at the senior-most levels of government spanning almost the entirety of U.S.-China engagement. As a longtime senator and then vice president, Biden never once acted to scuttle the integrationist-accommodationist policy that has left America in such a perilous position.

This is to say nothing of the disturbing appearance of corruption surrounding Biden’s tenure as vice president, in which he managed the “China portfolio,” while his son Hunter contemporaneously entered into an apparent sweetheart Chinese investment deal.

Thus far in the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden has flippantly downplayed the threat from China, only to quickly walk back his comments when he faced backlash. He attacked the Trump administration for “xenophobia” in enacting a travel ban early in the coronavirus crisis, only later to backtrack on that too. Now, Biden is trying a new tack: Portray himself as tougher on China than Trump.

This assertion is belied by his historical rhetoric and action, in contrast with a Trump administration that explicitly rejected the status quo by way of its national security strategy. That strategy notes the flaws of a premise to which Biden has long subscribed — that “engagement with rivals and their inclusion in international institutions and global commerce would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners” — and the Trump administration has acted accordingly.

The former vice president must tell us whether his views and policy prescriptions have markedly changed, or if his presidency would represent a reversion to the status quo ante.  Here are 23 questions the press ought to ask him but almost certainly won’t:.......To Read More....