In the six months since Biden took office, the Biden administration has adhered to a strategy of “strategic ambiguity” in what the U.S. considers its most important foreign relations, relaxing little by little while adopting seemingly draconian bans, for example, since June, when Biden revoked the Trump administration’s executive order to issue bans on TikTok and WeChat, and then immediately re-established and expanded sanctions on Chinese military-related and surveillance companies to maintain domestic political balance. But the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the panda-embracers who have been forced into silence since 2018 sulked, and since May, just recently, progressive human rights groups and think-tankers have been serving up various reasons through various channels why Biden must be friendly to China.
Pro-Communism in the Bones of American Progressives
Political (U.S.) reported that on July 7, more than 40 U.S. progressive groups sent a joint letter to Biden and members of Congress urging U.S. political decision-making circles to avoid confrontation with China (the Chinese Communist Party), calling on the U.S. to assume its historical responsibility to do more to reduce emissions, stop demonizing China to avoid climate responsibility, and claiming that “Biden’s policy toward China is destroying the Biden’s policies toward China are destroying the world.”
These progressive groups include the Sunrise Movement, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Fair Foreign Policy Initiative. “Just Foreign Policy, and Friends of the Earth. It is important to note that this is not the first time that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has made such a suggestion, but the third time since May of this year, when prominent far-left lawmakers and 60 activist groups called on the president to “not turn China into the Soviet Union of the 21st century” and Muslim Rep. Omar (D-N.Y.) said at the time, “We need to distinguish between legitimate criticism of the Chinese government’s human rights record and Cold War thinking that uses China as a scapegoat for our domestic problems and demonizes Chinese-Americans.” As recently as early July, nearly 30 organizations urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to support a less confrontational version of the anti-China legislation passed in Congress.
“The Politico website analyzes this as the latest exchange between the progressive and moderate wings of the Democratic Party that has been going on for months. The former believes cooperation on climate change should take precedence over competition with China, while the latter believes the administration can do both. “This intra-Democratic tug-of-war could define U.S.-China relations for years to come.”
Political’s analysis certainly does not mention that the progressive wing of the U.S. Democratic Party (the far-left forces) has a boneheaded affinity for the authoritarian culture of the Chinese Communist Party, not only because it is ideologically homogeneous – honoring Marxism – but more importantly because many of the struggle tactics are Mao-style Cultural Revolution rip-offs, such as the culture of abolition that bans dissenters, identity For example, the abolition of culture, identity politics, and historical nihilism to erase the smear of historical figures, are essentially the same. The so-called human rights slogans are just a means of survival to get donations and political struggle.
“The Resurgence of the “Panda-Huggers
After watching the far-left petition since May, the U.S. think tanks have finally come out in force this time. The reason they supported Biden in the first place was not particularly enthusiastic about progressive issues such as Defund Police, LGBTQ, bathroom choice by gender, or climate change, but rather the Trump administration’s policy toward China. This time, they came out to take a stand. A July 10 report in the Wall Street Journal listed the opinions of business elites and think tanks, and their great dissatisfaction was evident from its headline, “Biden’s China policy is taking shape – and it looks a lot like Trump,” because the participants in the anti-Trump coalition have different goals, and the biggest convention is to oppose Trump.
The White House sees three pillars of Biden’s China policy: strengthening the U.S. economy and democracy, rebuilding alliances damaged during the Trump administration, and defining areas of confrontation and cooperation with China (the Chinese Communist Party), the one that worries think tanks the most is Taiwan. in early June, three U.S. senators visited Taiwan to discuss issues such as Taiwan-U.S. relations and regional security with Taiwanese officials; plus the Biden administration this week also said it would launch trade and investment talks with Taiwan. Think-tankers believe this has angered Beijing, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province and believes it will go further than the Trump administration, which has avoided trade talks with Taiwan and focused on China. Although the Biden administration has not yet decided to formally sign a bilateral trade agreement with Taipei. But David Dollar, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, argued that the world has become an economically intertwined economy with China, and “trying to isolate China would not be welcomed by most of the world. …… I think it’s a tactic that is botched. They should be more inclined to cooperate.”
Never one to hide its pro-Beijing stance, less than 20 days after Trump announced a trade war with China in late March 2018, the Brookings Institution on April 9 subsequently released How China’s proposed tariffs could affect U.S. workers and industries), which breaks down the impact of China’s two lists of countervailing U.S. tariffs to the county level in the U.S. Of the 2,742 counties, 2,247 (82 percent) voted for Trump in 2016. The study’s calculations show that if a U.S.-China trade war were to break out, it would likely be President Donald Trump’s deep red vote that would be hurt the most. Tax increases on just two products, pork and soybeans, would have a huge impact on the deep red Midwestern states.
This report is tantamount to teaching Beijing to adopt a “soybean strategy” in the U.S.-China trade war, and to target Trump’s vote bank with a steady, accurate and hard hit.
How big is the impact of these two political groups?
These two political groups have very different spheres of influence and impact, but this time they are temporarily on the same page when it comes to China policy.
The far-left forces in the Democratic Party are fewer in number than the moderates, but their fighting power is superb, and their mass base is not small. Far from it, let’s say that when Biden was running in 2020, Obama and the moderates pushed Biden because they thought Biden was the biggest convention that the left-wing camp could accept: the economy would not adopt high tax policies that the business community would be afraid of, and there would be a discount on green protection. But in fact, Biden’s ideas later in the campaign, especially the closer to the election, became closer to the extreme progressive wing of the Democratic Party. The leftist camp was unhappy about this, but the Biden team did so by careful calculation: otherwise, it would not have been possible to drive the ultra-progressives to support Biden in any way they could (the main group of people in the election-rigging Alliance for the Defense of Democracies were such people, especially the BLM, which runs the grassroots election centers).
What percentage of the population are ultra-progressives? There are no authoritative statistics, but I found a way to measure their percentage. There is an interesting phenomenon in national polls conducted by Rasmussen surveys since the end of May 2020 where values are concerned (including policies that are heavily values-leaning): where those who favor extreme progressive ideas basically fluctuate at a median of 23%, with more or less than that on some too-sensitive topics, for example
A new Rasmussen national survey on July 8, 2021, finds that 78% of American voters believe it is at least somewhat important for schools to teach the traditional values of Western civilization, with 52% saying it is very important, but 23% oppose traditional education and favor progressive education now.
The question set for the July 7-8 national poll was, “Do you agree with the statement that the media ‘is indeed the enemy of the people?'” Fifty-eight percent of respondents agreed with this statement, while 23 percent strongly disagreed with it.
This 23 percent rate also appeared in a July 1, 2020 survey on “Defund The Police. Despite a spike in criminal cases across the U.S. as a result of the BLM movement that began in late May, the survey showed that 23 percent of people still favor eliminating the police.
During periods of far-left fervor, such as between May-November 2020, slightly more people agreed with extreme progressive ideas, and a June 17, 2020 survey coincided with the BLM movement sweeping the U.S., arguing that “Black Lives Matter” is more important than The percentage of people who believe that “Black Lives Matter” is more important than “All Lives Matter” is as high as 30 percent.
By 2021, after Biden’s inauguration, the fervor slowly receded a bit, and the April 30 survey showed that as many as 18 percent clearly identified with socialism.
For the Biden administration’s open borders and welcoming illegal immigrants into the U.S., one of the more concerning issues for Americans, a Rasmussen survey released May 11, 2021, showed that two-thirds of those polled saw it as a crisis and blamed Biden, with only 20 percent saying it was not a crisis.
At a rate of about 40% of the population, 23% is already a large percentage of Democratic supporters, and the leftward leaning of the Democratic Party is an undeniable fact. Based on the real-world ability of the progressives in the midterm congressional elections since 2018, and the role they play in the 2020 election, the moderate wing of the Democratic Party simply cannot deny the claims of the extreme progressives. The division of opinion within the Democratic Party of the United States over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following the rocket attacks on Israel by the Palestinian Hamas organization in mid-May of this year is a case in point: President Biden and the conservative wing of the Democratic Party expressed support for Israel; however, the left wing of the Democratic Party opposed Israel’s actions. In particular, the party’s young people are particularly divided from the party’s conservative wing on their views of the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and the online activities of these individuals can easily influence young people around the world to create a larger voice.
How much influence do think tanks have on U.S. government policy?
The U.S. business community, especially multinational conglomerates, the financial community, and Wall Street, are all pro-Beijing, and most of the think tanks, with the exception of a very few conservative think tanks, are also pro-Beijing. Together, these forces have dominated U.S. policy toward China for more than 20 years since the Clinton administration. The change in the Trump administration’s China policy did hit the panda-embracing faction for a time, forcing them to hunker down for a while. However, after the 2020 election, they all know that this hibernation is temporary. After Biden’s inauguration, China held its highest-ranking economic conference, the China Development Forum 2021 Annual Meeting, and the core figures of the panda-embracing faction, which began to form under Clinton and dominated U.S. policy toward China under Bush Jr. and Obama, were there this time: two former chairmen and current members of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers; six members from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, and New York Universities. The six Nobel laureates in economics from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia and New York Universities; the Brookings Institution, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, the president and former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Trade, the president of the Ford Foundation, the editor-in-chief of The Economist, etc. All of these institutions and people have basically become the dominant players in U.S. relations with China in the past 20 years. These institutions and these people have basically become the dominant players in U.S. relations with China over the past 20 years.
These people are all advocates of friendship with China.
To sum up, we can make the conclusion that Biden has always advocated that China is a partnership and should be friendly with China before and during the election. It is only when Hunter’s interests with China were exposed, coupled with the impact of the drastic change in China policy during the Trump presidency, and the shadow of China being the source of the epidemic, that the Biden administration had to adopt a “strategic ambiguity” strategy to deal with the situation for the time being. As soon as the time is ripe and the progressives and the panda-embracing faction are handed a ladder to step down, Biden’s current “strategic ambiguity” policy toward China will end.
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