President Biden has ramped up his anti-China rhetoric on the campaign trail ahead of November, looking to grab headlines away from Trump while touring northern industrial states, and he has just called for major increases to some tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum products.
"These are strategic and targeted actions that are going to protect American workers and ensure fair competition," Biden told a small crowd of members at the United Steelworkers. "Meanwhile, my predecessor and the MAGA Republicans want across-the-board tariffs on all imports, from all countries, that could badly hurt American consumers."
According to more from Biden's speech via the NY Times, he said he would tell US trade representative Katherine Tai to increase tariffs "to what White House officials said would be 25 percent on certain Chinese products that now face tariffs of 7.5 percent, or none at all, pending the outcome of an administration review of the China tariffs initially imposed under Mr. Trump."
But as fully expected, Biden's words once again inflamed tensions with Beijing, given that in the remarks he slammed China as "xenophobic" while commenting on the Asian powerhouse's current economic struggles.
"They’ve got a population that is more people in retirement than working. They’re not importing anything. They’re xenophobic—nobody else coming in. They’ve got real problems" Biden said further on Wednesday.
He had also accused China of cheating and policies that do harm against fair competition. The president said according to the White House readout:
Because Chinese steel companies produce a lot more steel than China needs, it ends up dumping the extra steel into the global markets at unfairly low prices. And the prices are unfairly low because Chinese steel companies don’t need to worry about making a profit, because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily.
They’re not competing. They’re cheating. They’re cheating. And we’ve seen the damage here in America.
You know, back in the early 2000s, the Chinese steel began floating the mar- — flooding the market wi- — in steel towns all across Pennsylvania and Ohio, who were hit very hard.
The accusation of xenophobia and cheating marks the most aggressive rebuke of China thus far on the campaign.
China's foreign ministry was quick to respond Thursday by once again highlighting US 'hypocrisy' - with spokesman Lin Jian lashing out sarcastically, "China wants to ask the U.S. whether it is referring to China, or the U.S. itself."
Biden on his Pennsylvania tour also pledged to continue seeking to deny China advanced technology like computer chips. "They can’t be sent to China because it would undermine our national security," Biden said. "When I spoke with Xi Jinping he said ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Because you’d use it for all the wrong reasons, so you’re not gonna get those advanced computer chips.’"
US-China relations have someone stabilized of late, also amid the Biden-Xi phone call of two weeks ago. Also, this week Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke to his Chinese counterpart for the first time in two years, as the two sides work to restore regular military-to-military communications.
