Biden’s Flip-Flops on China

Ying Ma

Politics, Americas

Joe Biden seems not to recall that back when he was vice president, it was his boss who told everyone that China was going to eat our lunch.

Democratic candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden has been ridiculed for his recent flip-flopping on China, but few have noticed that his original pronouncement actually revealed a disagreement with former President Barack Obama.

Here is what Biden said while campaigning in Iowa in May: “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. . . . They’re not competition for us.”

In New Hampshire, a few weeks later, he reiterated these sentiments: “Our workers are literally three times as productive as workers . . . in Asia.”

In both cases, Biden was characterizing President Donald Trump’s current adversarial approach to China as an overreaction without a strategy. Yet, Biden seems not to recall that back when he was vice president, it was his boss who told everyone that China was going to eat our lunch.

At the beginning of his first term, Obama repeatedly invoked China’s massive, state-directed infrastructure spending to call for more stimulus spending for the U.S. economy. Republicans in Congress who objected were accused of holding back America’s progress vis-à-vis China in the twenty-first century.

Obama was not the only one who felt this way. From New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to trade union leader Andy Stern, prominent figures on the Left ogled over the Chinese one-party system’s ability to make quick decisions and implement grand plans on everything from building high-speed rail to promoting green energy. Each time, they blamed congressional Republicans for standing in the way of similar massive government undertakings in the United States.

Yet leftwing luminaries never understood that China became the second-largest economy in the world by implementing economic reforms that allowed for more economic freedom, not less, and that even after decades of economic expansion, China’s endemic state intervention continued to impose significant inefficiencies and impeded economic progress.