It would not be unreasonable to stipulate that the Trump administration has so far been less aggressive toward Beijing than even his Democratic predecessor.
When it comes to confronting China, Jim Geraghty details the numerous ways in which the Trump administration has fallen short of the expectations the president set for himself on the campaign trail. Indeed, from the incoming influx of hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, Trump’s flagrant noncompliance with Congress’s TikTok ban, and the relaxation of export controls designed to prevent Chinese communists from accessing U.S. technologies with military applications, it would not be unreasonable to stipulate that the Trump administration has so far been less aggressive toward Beijing than even his Democratic predecessor.
Jim’s litany of Trump overtures to the Chicoms is comprehensive, but I would add to it some more recent Chinese violations of U.S. sovereignty.
A disturbing New York Times report earlier this week detailed the extent of the People’s Republic’s efforts to meddle in U.S. elections and thwart the ambitions of aspiring China hawks. Beijing-backed “organizations have quietly foiled the careers of politicians who opposed China’s authoritarian government while backing others who supported policies of the country’s ruling Communist Party,” the Times reported.
China’s influence operations in the United States “have been especially potent in New York City, home to 600,000 ethnic Chinese people,” the dispatch continued. It detailed the degree to which tax-exempt Chinese charities administer oaths of loyalty to U.S. politicians and solicit pledges of fealty to China’s principle of “reunification” with Taiwan — a violation of their tax-exempt status. It convincingly demonstrated how Chinese associations played a role in replacing one anti-PRC city councilwoman with another candidate friendlier to Beijing’s interests.
The item linked these efforts to the scandalizing revelation that an aide to New York Governor Kathy Hochul was indicted last year for engaging in clandestine activities “supervised, directed, and controlled” by Chinese government officials (an operation that was part of an extensive back channel network to Beijing exposed by our own Jimmy Quinn).
And the piece reminded readers of the fact that the Justice Department uncovered the existence of a secret Chinese government-run police station in the heart of Manhattan, which conspired to obstruct U.S. justice and intimidate Chinese dissidents in America. Indeed, the secret Chinese police station that officials uncovered in New York City is just one of perhaps dozens of similar outposts doing Beijing’s bidding deep under cover across the Western world.
All this has produced little more than a hefty yawn from Trump officials — at least in public. Perhaps more consternation is expressed behind closed doors. If so, that consternation has not yielded a China policy that even remotely resembles the one Trump and his advocates retailed on the campaign trail. Indeed, throughout 2024, we were told that America’s priorities were all wrong when it came to the threat from the East, not to mention our domestic priorities. China would eat our lunch, they said, if we didn’t radically revise America’s military and trade posture. Well, the military and trade posture has certainly undergone a makeover, but not in service to the supposed goal of confronting China.
We might logically conclude, then, that those who insisted we had to pursue “industrial policy” at home and tariffs abroad, and to sacrifice our frontline partners in the global war against U.S. hegemony lest the Chinese get the better of us, were just fishing for a rationale that justified their policy preferences. Once you dispense with the motivated reasoning that partisan affinities inspire, what other explanation is left?