The Washington Post: As China’s power grows, US election candidates are using it as attack line

Dark insinuations that one candidate might have been recruited as a spy by Chinese leaders as a younger man. Attacks accusing another would-be senator of profiting off a Chinese fentanyl manufacturer. And ads alleging another candidate sold Chinese-made SUVs in his car dealership several years ago.

Democrats and Republicans are aggressively tying their opponents to China in the final months of the 2024 campaign, hoping that invoking the nation that many Americans blame for mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic, the deadly opioid crisis and US economic woes will boost their own chances at the ballot box.

“China is not exactly wildly popular among Americans these days,” said GOP political consultant Whit Ayres. “There’s a widespread view that they are guilty of intellectual theft and that they don’t play by the rules.”

China-bashing has long been a staple of US politics.

Former president Donald Trump made cracking down on the world’s second-largest economy with tariffs a core piece of his 2016 campaign, for example, and politicians of both parties have appealed to anger about outsourcing of jobs in past cycles, especially in Rust Belt states with ailing manufacturing industries.

But this year, as tensions between the two nations mount, the issue is particularly intense, with candidates locked in lengthy back-and-forth battles over which of them is more connected to China.

There have been 171 campaign ads for congressional or presidential candidates mentioning China so far this cycle, according to the AdImpact database of political advertisements.

And there are some signs that Democrats are beginning to push the issue more than in the past, when hawkish Republicans generally owned China-related attacks.

In the 2020 cycle, 82 percent of China-related ads for Senate candidates were bought by Republicans or GOP-backed groups. Over the same time period in this cycle, a majority of China-related ads are paid for by Democrats, with only 36 per cent of them coming from Republicans.

The ads play off voters’ genuine anxiety about the role of a rising and more aggressive China on the world stage.

Under the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping, the People’s Republic of China has rapidly expanded its military might and presence around the globe, increasingly antagonising US allies such as Taiwan and the Philippines.

And Chinese state-backed enterprises are alleged to have stolen American intellectual property; while the government is accused of violating environmental and international trade laws; flooded domestic markets with cheap products; and have sought to outpace the United States in the development of cutting-edge technologies and the exploitation of critical minerals.

The attacks are also sometimes conspiratorial in nature, evoking Cold War-era fears of deep cover spies.

Republicans are leveling unfounded attacks that Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate, may have been “groomed” by China.

He travelled to China dozens of times over the past few decades, first as a young English teacher there and later as a member of Congress, where he served on a commission that focused on the country’s human rights issues.

Republican representative for Kentucky James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, and vice-presidential candidate Senator JD Vance have insinuated without basis that he’s a Chinese plant.

“Now I know, and we all know, that Kamala Harris wanted to outsource our factories and jobs to China, but I didn’t expect her to outsource the selection of her running-mate to China too,” Vance said at an August rally in North Carolina.

Comer said in a Fox News interview, without evidence, that it’s “possible” China would be “grooming an up and coming rising star in the political process to try to have a foothold in our government.”

Comer wrote a letter to the FBI seeking information about Walz’s connections to Chinese officials, citing the years when Walz organised annual student trips to the nation.

Walz’s team pushed back on the allegations, and pointed out he has been critical of Chinese human rights abuses during his time in Congress and beyond.

“Throughout his career, Governor Walz has stood up to the (Chinese Communist Party), fought for human rights and democracy, and always put American jobs and manufacturing first,” Walz spokesman Teddy Tschann said in a statement.

“Republicans are twisting basic facts and desperately lying to distract from the Trump-Vance agenda: praising dictators and sending American jobs to China.”

Harris has not laid out her views in detail on the US-China relationship, but briefly mentioned in her speech to the Democratic National Convention that she wants to ensure “America - not China - wins the competition for the 21st century.”

The negative ads and attacks on China pervading the campaign trail raise the possibility that future Congresses will take an even more oppositional posture to the nation, in part to cater to voters’ increasing scepticism.

China’s unpopularity with Americans began growing around 2017 and only worsened after the COVID pandemic, which originated in Wuhan.

About 80 percent of Americans said they had an unfavourable view of the nation in a Gallup poll taken earlier this year. Republicans are more hostile toward China than Democrats are, with almost 60 percent of them describing China as an “enemy” of the United States, compared to 30 percent of Democrats, according to a Pew poll.

Since 2019, Congress has taken a more sharply negative tone toward the rising superpower, and introduced six times as many bills on the subject in 2021 compared to 2013, according to an analysis published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In recent years, Congress has set aside billions more in spending to defeat China’s military, curtailed China’s access to semiconductors and bolstered efforts to create an anti-China global coalition. Countering China is one of the few remaining bipartisan areas of agreement on Capitol Hill.

“The American people have started to kind of wake up to the reality that China is not just a benign trading partner or a large market for our exports, but the Chinese Communist Party actually represents a national security threat,” said Republican representative Andy Barr, a member of a special House committee created last year to focus on the threats posed by China.

But some worry about the slippery slope between targeting nefarious practices through policy and rhetoric, and casting broader blame upon Chinese people, including Chinese immigrants.

The FBI reported a spike in hate crimes targeting Asian Americans after the pandemic.

“I think that that is something that we have to be very careful about,” said Norma J. Torres, a Democrat representative for California, who sits on the House subcommittee that appropriates US foreign policy spending, “For some of my colleagues, it all starts and ends with China. And this is the dangerous part … It creates a lot of potential for violence in our communities again.”

The China-related battles are especially heated in the Midwestern Senate races where vulnerable Democratic incumbents are fighting to hold onto their seats - and their slim majority of the chamber.

Blasting their Republican opponents on China is a way to try to disqualify them in the minds of Republican-leaning voters, who polls show are especially sceptical of the nation.

In Pennsylvania, Democrat Senator Bob Casey has been running a battery of TV ads bashing his opponent, Dave McCormick, for his investments in China while he was CEO of the hedge fund Bridgewater, tying them to the state’s deadly opioid epidemic.

In one Casey ad, Trump is heard criticising McCormick for working “with a company that managed money for communist China,” an attack Trump made when McCormick was running against Trump’s preferred candidate in the 2022 Senate race primary.

The ad also accuses McCormick of investing in “China’s biggest maker of fentanyl.”

In another, a narrator describes the staggering death rate from fentanyl, which U.S. officials say is primarily made from chemical precursors that originate in China.

“While law enforcement and grieving families see a killer, Dave McCormick saw a way to get even richer,” says the ad, and accused McCormick of “profiting off people’s pain.”

McCormick released his own ad saying his company never invested in producers of illegal fentanyl in China. The company invested in a Chinese pharmaceutical company that makes legal fentanyl, called Humanwell, for legitimate medical purposes.

In turn, McCormick’s campaign characterized Casey as “weak on China,” pointing out his votes for the Inflation Reduction Act, which it described as “enrich[ing] China’s EV industry” in another ad.

That piece of legislation included billions of dollars in tax credits to bolster the adoption of electric vehicles, or EVs, with the aim of reducing the nation’s carbon emissions.

Many of those EVs are made with Chinese-produced materials, though the Biden administration recently ruled that vehicles with Chinese-made batteries will no longer be eligible for the tax credit.

The hotly contested race for Senate in Michigan, a key battleground that could help determine control of the chamber, is another where candidates from both parties have argued the other has unacceptable ties to China.

Representative Elissa Slotkin, the Democratic Senate nominee, has blasted her rival, Senate GOP nominee and former Representative Mike Rogers, in one ad for “helping Chinese companies get access to the US” as a logo for Huawei, the Chinese tech firm, appears on the screen.

The claim is misleading, PolitiFact concluded, given that Rogers worked for such US technology companies as AT&T and Nokia - but there is no evidence he helped them with deals involving the Chinese technology conglomerate.

“Profit from China or protect America. That’s the choice,” Slotkin said in another ad.

The Republicans’ Senate campaign arm is calling her “Shanghai Slotkin” in return, accusing her of signing a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA, several years ago involving a Chinese-based company called Gotion that’s building an electric vehicle battery factory near Big Rapids.

A Detroit News investigation found that a staffer for Slotkin, but not the congresswoman, signed an NDA to get information on the Gotion factory, and Slotkin’s campaign strongly denies any connection between Slotkin and the factory, which is outside her district.

“I’ve known Mike now for 15 years,” Pompeo said of Rogers. “We both had come to understand the Chinese Communist Party as the central threat to the American way of life long before it was cool to do so.”

A similar dynamic is playing out in another important Senate race in Ohio. There, Bernie Moreno, who’s running against Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown, has described China as a threat to US workers and vowed to crack down on them.

But Brown and his allies are running ads exploiting anxieties in the state about China’s rising auto industry and the outsourcing of US auto jobs there. In one ad, a former autoworker criticises Moreno, a former car dealer, for selling China-made SUVs.

“The Chinese cars that Bernie Moreno sold are the same cars that led to our plant being shut down,” the worker says.

Montana Democrat Senator Jon Tester, who is in the fight of his political life to hold onto his seat in his red state, ran the first ad of his race highlighting his work trying to crack down on the sale of Montana farmland to China.

His opponent, Tim Sheehy, dismissed him as weak on China, saying in his own ad that “on Tester’s watch, China has stolen our jobs and Chinese ownership of Montana farm land has soared.”

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