The good news is that the inadvisability of helping the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese government to tyrannize and globally dominate is a major political issue in the Republican presidential primary. The even better news, perhaps, post-2024: much less abetting of a giant totalitarian adverary trying to crush us.
Trump: I will implement a bold series of reforms to completely eliminate dependence on China in all critical areas. We will revoke China’s most-favored nation trade status and adopt a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods, everything from electronics to steel to pharmaceuticals. This will include strong protections to ensure China cannot circumvent restrictions by passing goods through conduit countries. We will also adopt new rules to stop U.S. companies from pouring investments into China and to stop China from buying up America, allowing all of those investments that clearly serve American interests.
DeSantis: We now have a peer competitor, and that competitor is the Chinese Communist Party. And it’s something that we have to face, and we have to have policy that’s going to be able to protect the American people from the looming China threat. We currently lack the leadership necessary to confront these current challenges.
Biden wants to force everybody to do an electric vehicle, which then will make us more dependent on China because they’re the leader in producing these minerals. But then when we have our own deposits here, he takes that out of circulation and he won’t let that be mined. We need to be doing the opposite, reversing the EV mandates of course, but also doing the mining that we need to be able to make our country stronger. We need to enact tax trade and regulatory policies designed to secure critical supply chains and to effectuate a strategic decoupling of the US economy from China and from the CCP. We must forcefully counter malicious CCP economic behavior, and we have to leverage our alliances in the free world versus the CCP.
Haley: The Chinese military has become stronger, testing us like never before. Last month, a Chinese fighter jet came within 400 feet of an American aircraft flying in international airspace above the south china sea. Earlier this month [June 2023], a Chinese naval ship came within 150 yards of an American destroyer in the Taiwan straight. We all remember the Chinese spy balloon that flew over our homeland months ago. It was not taking pictures of our prairies or beaches. It was flying over American nuclear missile sites, and this month it was revealed that China has developed a spy base in our own backyard on the fellow communist island of Cuba.
These provocations are not coincidences or accidents. They are the purposeful actions of a communist dictatorship that is determined to expand its power and defeat America militarily and economically. America is china’s number one target. The question is, what are we going to do about it? This is a central question of presidential leadership for the current president and for the next one.
Christie: I think the problem has been the entire Biden administration has been filled with mishaps towards China. He has made mistakes in terms of not being tougher against China on the stealing of our intellectual property, letting spy balloons fly over our country unharassed. I think people who know me know that there will be no confusion on the part of President Xi when I’m president of the United States about what American policy is. And that every day we will be fighting to make America the winner in this competition against China.
Ramaswamy: If we want to declare independence from China, that means we’ve got to be willing to ban most U.S. businesses from doing business in China until the CCP falls or until the CCP radically reforms itself.
Scott: China is the biggest threat to America’s security. Emboldened by Biden’s weakness, they are buying up our farmland, spying on our kids, and stealing our jobs. As president, I’ll keep China out of our homeland and out of our data. I’ll protect American workers. And I will return our military to the fiercest military machine in the world. We need a commander-in-chief with a backbone.
