If you are Donald Trump and the Chinese Communist Party says it wants to win-win cooperate with you, that’s not a good sign. It is important to keep in mind the enduring insight of one astute critic of the regime: “Donald Trump, don’t trust China! China is asshoe!”
Newsweek reports the words of Mao Ning, spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry, in response to the American election: “China has always been consistent in its policy toward the U.S. and will continue to view and handle China-U.S. relations in accordance with the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation” (November 7, 2024).
The Chinese government is certainly guilty of various forms of consistency in manifesting its totalitarian inclinations. But it does not act in accordance with a desire for “mutual respect,” “peaceful coexistence,” and “win-win cooperation” if these things add up to something other than a desire for appeasement and surrender.
Newsweek:
The ongoing trade war between the world’s first and second-largest economies began in 2018 when the Trump administration launched a broadside of tariffs, citing alleged longstanding unfair trade policies and intellectual property theft.
The Biden administration earlier this year opted to maintain Trump-era tariffs on some $300 billion worth of Chinese goods and hiked duties to 100 percent on a range of products China is a major producer of, including electric vehicles and solar panels.
“Trump is likely to follow through on his pledge to impose more tariffs on China,” Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told Newsweek. “It remains to be seen whether they will be part of a broader coherent strategy aimed at winning the strategic competition with China.”
The new U.S. Senate can help the new administration achieve the broader coherent strategy that Glaser calls for by passing the anti-totalitarian measures coming out of the U.S. House.
More from Ning
Ning also lets us know with an affectation of graciousness that our election “is an internal affair of the United States, and we respect the choice of the American people.”
This is a way of implying that no matter what is going on internally in a country—elections, mass surveillance and censorship, imprisonment and torture and murder of critics of the government, cultural genocide, whatever it happens to be—nobody outside the country is justified in criticizing or opposing any of these things. Which is false.
