On the menu today: Tuesday night’s presidential debate did feature some brief comments about China, even if the moderators didn’t ask about our preeminent foreign-policy challenge even once. Harris’s accusation that Trump “sold us out” on China and semiconductors is highly misleading, and the Biden administration’s bans on Chinese use of the chips are as leaky as a sieve. Finally, while I’ll give Kamala Harris a gold star for remembering the unanswered questions about the origin of Covid-19 and the Chinese government’s stonewalling of international investigative efforts, there’s little reason to think she’s willing to make it a priority with Beijing. Read on.
The Dragon in the Room
Yesterday morning, Hugh Hewitt was spitting hot fire about the debate moderators not asking a question about China. “Astonishingly, the greatest threat to our way of life is China — China, China, China. The largest military buildup in history. The genocide against the Uyghurs. Hong Kong suppressed Jimmy Lai in prison. Do you think Disney told ABC — because Disney owns ABC, and they have parks and merch and all that stuff in China — not to bring up China?”
Look, if it were up to me, there would be a whole presidential debate just on topics related to China, moderated by our Jimmy Quinn, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin, and a few other experts and journalists who focus on that country’s government.
But China did come up in passing several times — 13 times in the transcript. Trump boasted that Viktor Orban said “China was afraid of” Trump. He said he would block imports from Chinese auto-parts manufacturers and car makers operating in Mexico, and he claimed, “Biden doesn’t go after people because supposedly China paid him millions of dollars.”
But there’s a lot more to chew over in the handful of Harris statements about China.
As a lead-in to her China comments, Harris charged, “Well, let’s be clear that the Trump administration resulted in a trade deficit, one of the highest we’ve ever seen in the history of America.”
Let’s be clear, madam vice president, that there was a trade deficit before Trump came into office, it continued and slowly and steadily grew worse while he was president, and it grew even worse after he left and once Joe Biden was in office. The gap between what the United States imports and what it exports hit a record in 2022.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis — the U.S. trade balance with rest of the world for much of the Trump era was a squiggly line that grew greater in value over time — from $66 billion in January 2017 to $84 billion in January 2021. It hit $103 billion in July 2024, the most recent month available.
As the debate moderators noted, it’s odd for Harris to hit Trump for his trade policies when “outside of allowing the washing-machines tariffs to expire in 2023 and some narrow modifications to the steel and aluminum tariffs and solar-panel tariffs, President Biden has kept nearly all Trump tariffs in place.”
The protectionist philosophies at work in both administrations did a lot more to punish and limit our exports to other countries than to punish and limit other countries’ exports to us.
More specifically on China, in January 2020, Trump signed what he called “phase one of the historic trade deal between the United States and China. Together, we are righting the wrongs of the past and delivering a future of economic justice and security for American workers, farmers, and families.” By the end of 2021, “China bought only 58 percent of the U.S. exports it had committed to purchase under the agreement, not even enough to reach its import levels from before the trade war.”
Harris continued, “He invited trade wars. You wanna talk about his deal with China? What he ended up doing is under Donald Trump’s presidency? He ended up selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military — basically sold us out when a policy about China should be in making sure the United States of America wins the competition for the 21st century.”
It will not surprise you to learn that Harris’s accusation isn’t completely accurate. As president, Trump and his administration took several steps to prevent China from acquiring advanced American-made chips. Back in 2017, he blocked state-owned China Venture Capital Fund Corporation Limited from purchasing Portland’s largest tech company, Lattice Semiconductor Corporation, citing national-security concerns.
Trump’s policies toward Huawei Technologies can hardly be called nice: “The Trump administration notified Huawei suppliers, including chipmaker Intel, that it is revoking certain licenses to sell to the Chinese company and intends to reject dozens of other applications to supply the telecommunications firm, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.” The Trump administration also added prominent Chinese semiconductor and drone manufacturers to an export blacklist, although that wasn’t until December 2020.
Yes, the Biden administration later enacted more sweeping restrictions on selling chips to China. But “Chinese military bodies, state-run artificial intelligence-research institutes and universities” are finding workarounds to get their hands on Nvidia semiconductors. A declared ban and an effective ban are two different things.
Harris continued, “Which means focusing on the details of what that requires, focusing on relationships with our allies, focusing on investing in American-based technology so that we win the race on A.I. and quantum computing, focusing on what we need to do to support America’s workforce, so that we don’t end up having the short end of the stick in terms of workers’ rights.”
I strongly suspect that neither Trump nor Harris could talk about federal-government policies regarding artificial intelligence in any particular detail. The 2024 GOP platform offers some standard anti-regulation boilerplate: “We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”
Harris did give a speech about A.I. at the U.S. Embassy in London last November, but it was mostly platitudes:
President Biden and I have established the United States AI Safety Institute, which will create rigorous standards to test the safety of AI models for public use.
Today, we are also taking steps to establish requirements that when the United States government uses AI, it advances the public interest. And we intend that these domestic AI policies will serve as a model for global policy, understanding that AI developed in one nation can impact the lives and livelihoods of billions of people around the world.
Fundamentally, it is our belief that technology with global impact deserves global action.
And so, to provide order and stability in the midst of global technological change, I firmly believe that we must be guided by a common set of understandings among nations. And that is why the United States will continue to work with our allies and partners to apply existing international rules and norms to AI and work to create new rules and norms.
In other words, Vice President Harris believes that AI should be used to do good things and not bad things.
As for quantum computing — plug, plug — it’s a similar story of wanting the U.S. to have the technology and to do good things with it, and not wanting the bad guys to have it and do bad things with it, and wanting to otherwise throw money at quantum-computing projects.
In the closing months of the Trump administration, “The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced the launch of Quantum.gov, the official website of the National Quantum Coordination Office, and the release of the Quantum Frontiers Report identifying key areas for continued quantum information science (QIS) research.”
As a senator, Harris introduced a bill to establish a Department of Defense Quantum Computing Research Consortium. Back in 2018, the House passed similar legislation under suspension of the rules (no recorded vote, a sign that it was particularly noncontroversial), and it passed the Senate by unanimous consent. This created the National Quantum Initiative, and the fiscal year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act authorized the service secretaries to establish or designate QIS Research Centers.
The most surprising statement of the night from Kamala Harris:
But what Donald Trump did let’s talk about this with COVID, is he actually thanked President Xi for what he did during COVID. Look at his tweet. “Thank you, President XI,” exclamation point. When we know that Xi was responsible for lacking and not giving us transparency about the origins of COVID.
Why was the Democratic nominee bringing up the origins of Covid, and not the Republican nominee? I know, I know, it’s not as exciting as talking about Haitian migrants eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. All the pandemic did was kill 1.2 million Americans, 7 million people around the world in the official death numbers, and tens of millions in “excess deaths” around the world starting in January 2020.
Every now and then you’ll see some lonely crusader such as Alina Chan or Matt Ridley remind us of the high probability of the global pandemic tracing back to reckless experiments in unsafe conditions, covered up and denied by the Chinese government. But by and large, almost everyone in America has chosen to just forget about the whole thing.
I’ll give Kamala Harris a gold star for bringing it up. But with that said . . . just what has the Biden administration done to push the Chinese government for transparency about the origins of Covid? As far as I can tell, Harris is interested in the origins of Covid as a cudgel to use against Trump, not as a genuine priority of her potential administration.
ADDENDUM: So, if biased moderators really are an intolerable outrage to the GOP . . . what are the odds that the dynamic will be different on the night of October 1, when the vice-presidential debate will be moderated by CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell and Face the Nation moderator and CBS News foreign-affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan? And if the GOP believes that these televised debates are just giant ambushes designed to help elect the Democrat . . . should J. D. Vance participate or withdraw?
Meanwhile, over at that other place I write for, Mount Trump erupts, and I join a post-debate hangover chat.