Fact Check: Trump, Biden Claims on China Policy | China in Focus

Welcome to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. Our top story zooming in on 2024's first presidential debate. Despite rising tensions between the U.S. and China, the two candidates did not address China much except for tariffs and trade deficit. We fact-check their claims. The U.S. views China as threat number one. With that in mind, what China issues should have been in focus during the presidential debate? Retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding shares his take. They've shown a propensity to steal technology and then also innovate themselves to surpass us. Concerns are rising that U.S. maritime power is on the decline while China is working hard to catch up. Where do two nations stand on sea power right now? An expert breaks it down. And the Milwaukee Tool Company gets sued. A man in China claims the world-recognized power toolmaker is trying to force labor happening inside a Chinese prison. Milwaukee Tool denies the accusation. Tariffs and trade deficits, two China topics that came up in the first presidential debate in 2024. Despite plunging relations between the two countries, President Biden and former President Trump didn't touch on China much. The word China was only mentioned 14 times during the debate. Dante Mills is a national trial attorney at Mills and Edwards. He said with China aiming to knock the U.S. out of its top spot as the world's largest economy, Washington should plan accordingly. That we're making sure that they take our goods just like we are taking their goods in. We want import and export to start to become balanced. Those are things you want to hear from your candidates to make sure that we can export and we can put our product out because that generates revenue in our country and it boosts our economy. So those are things that I look forward to hearing, but unfortunately they didn't come up at all. Important to note, topics for presidential debates are chosen by the moderators. Tariffs did come up. President Trump has proposed a 10 percent tariff on all imports and a 60 percent tariff on imports from China. One of the moderators asked Trump how he would ensure that tariffs wouldn't drive prices higher. Most of the Chinese exports to the U.S. are low-value goods and highly replaceable, such as shoes, clothing and electronic products. After the U.S. hiked tariffs on China, many U.S. companies then shifted their supply chain, importing similar goods from Vietnam and India instead to avoid tariffs. Imports from China accounted for about 16 percent of total U.S. imports in 2022. As for trade deficits, President Biden said during his term the U.S. has the lowest trade deficit with China since 2010, while Trump said it's the largest in U.S. history under Biden. Having a trade deficit with China means the U.S. buys more goods from China than it buys from the U.S. Here's our fact check. In 2023, the U.S. trade deficit with China stood at $279 billion. That's compared to 2018, when trade deficit with China hit over $418 billion. Tang noted plunging exports from China contributed to the trade deficit drop under Biden. China was at the peak of its COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Authorities frequently put cities under lockdowns to keep COVID cases as close to zero as possible. It has had a huge impact on exports since. Trump also mentioned that Biden has kept the tariffs he imposed on China before he left office. In 2018, Trump slapped tariffs on over $360 billion worth of Chinese goods. The penalties were to pressure Beijing into buying more U.S. goods. Biden criticized Trump's China tariffs back in 2019, calling them, quote, short-sighted. After Biden took office, he kept the tariffs in place. And this May, Biden said he would quadruple tariffs on China's main electric vehicles to over 100 percent and double tariffs on semiconductors to 50 percent. In the presidential debate on Thursday evening, neither President Biden nor former President Trump addressed the threat from the Chinese Communist Party, despite the fact that the United States considers communist China threat number one. What are some of the top China issues facing the U.S.? And how does Beijing measure up in its competition with Washington? NTD's Business Matters host Don Ma spoke to retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spaulding to find out more. Well, I think the number one thing that probably needs to be addressed is the continuing relationship they have with our corporate sector and our financial sector. You know, the fact that they continue to undermine our trade policy, our economic and financial policy, and really influence our political process, to include with platforms like TikTok. So really, all aspects of their interaction with the U.S. is something that should be looked at strenuously by the next administration. All right. Let's talk a little bit about U.S.-China competition. Where would you say that the U.S. is losing to China and that China is beating the U.S.? Well, across the technology space, certainly artificial intelligence, while they're not dominant in chips, they're working towards it and they've shown a propensity to steal technology and then also innovate themselves to surpass us. So hypersonics is another one that they're beating us in space. Other than commercial launch, I mean, they are on the other side of the moon. They're doing a lot of things that our own NASA has trouble keeping up with, and that's because they're investing in these things, but they're also stealing technology. And that comes through our relationship with our labs, with our universities, with our corporations. You know, it's a wholesale effort to basically take technology and use it for their own purposes. And really across the spectrum, they're being dominant in technology. The only thing that they're kind of behind in now, you know, I would say is chips, very advanced jet engines. Those seem to be things that we've kept dominance in. But again, they're working very hard to both steal and innovate themselves to replace us. So in the items that you mentioned that China is beating the U.S., why is that? Why is China, what is the difference between the U.S. and China that in those aspects that you mentioned, China is winning? Well, for instance, in data, you know, they, they, the state can gather as much data as they want against their own population. They're stealing our data. You know, it's widely reported they're redirecting traffic from the United States into China so they can capture that data and then use that for to develop their artificial intelligence. And that's essentially that. And they're very much lack of inhibitions in terms of how they use AI. And I think, you know, in hypersonics, they're just launching more hypersonic vehicles. And, you know, we did that for a time and then we stopped doing it. So, you know, there was a time during the Cold War, we're spending two percent of GDP on research and technology. And we stopped that after the end of the Cold War. Well, the Chinese have, in fact, they've accelerated that. So not only are they stealing our technology, are our scientists want to go over there and work with them because they're the ones that are actually doing the things that we were doing during the first Cold War. Remember, we were developing supersonic aircraft and all of these capabilities, the space race was happening. We were sending scientists and engineers to university on behalf of national security scholarships. So we were really, you know, competing in more of an economic and technological capability than we are now, whereas China's kind of replaced us. So if you think about the relative position between the U.S. and the Soviet Union today, China is like America was back during the first Cold War. And we're like the Soviet Union. You know, a lot of these things like Ukraine and Korea and, you know, certainly the Middle East, we're spending money on those wars. We're going bankrupt, just like the Soviet Union was going bankrupt. And, you know, rather than cutting them off from having access to our technology, talent and capital, we're just letting them take it. And then they're investing money in the same ways we were investing money during the first Cold War. So the roles have been reserved, reversed, and that's because they studied how we won the Cold War with the Soviet Union. So their goal is to demoralize us, bankrupt us and slowly, you know, dissolve the nation that we know and love. All right. Well, I wish we had more time, but that's all for today. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. The U.S. Navy dominates the world's oceans, but China has been playing catch up. One recent breakthrough, a homegrown aircraft carrier that began its sea trial in May. How does the ship stack up against the most advanced carrier in the U.S.? NTD's Juliet Song has the details. China's most advanced aircraft carrier, the Fujian, began its first sea trials in May. How does it compare to America's most advanced aircraft carrier, the USS Ford? Rick Fisher is a senior fellow of the International Assessment and Strategy Center. He says the Fujian has two innovations that are also built into the Ford carrier. Most important of which being that China has leapt from steam-powered aircraft catapults to electromagnetic, electricity-powered aircraft catapults. Carriers use catapults to launch fighter jets. Compared to traditional steam catapults, electromagnetic catapults can launch more planes and take up less space. Other than the Fujian, the USS Ford is the only carrier in the world that features an electromagnetic catapult system. Secondly, Fujian uses what appear to be a very sophisticated suite of active electronic array radar. He added the real difference would come in the Chinese Navy's ability to operate a carrier. The U.S. has decades of experience. And not only operating carriers, but operating them in concert with a defensive aircraft carrier battle group, a logistics support group, and integrating aircraft carrier operations seamlessly into joint operations with air forces and ground forces. What's more, Chinese carriers run on conventional fuel, while U.S. carriers are nuclear-powered, meaning they can remain at sea as long as there are enough supplies for the crew. Though Fisher said that doesn't matter as much in regional conflicts. That, in a sense, is not a great difference, especially should China decide to use its aircraft carrier militarily against a country that is not allied with the United States and is fairly weak. China has three aircraft carriers. The U.S. has 11. Beijing aims to have six carriers by 2035. The U.S. Navy has three Ford-class carriers under construction. But aircraft carriers are only one aspect of a country's maritime power. China has been working hard on other fronts. It has more warships than the U.S., and its shipbuilding capability is 330 times that of the U.S., meaning China can repair damaged ships much faster than the U.S. in a conflict. The ability to produce not just naval ships, but a large variety of commercial ships, from buoy tenders to the largest container cargo ships, oil tankers. In addition, China has been investing in its coast guard, a very large coast guard, a very large maritime militia. Fisher noted, having built up its naval power, China is now starting to project that power into critical waterways in the Indo-Pacific. And with the construction of large aircraft carriers like the Fujian, China's maritime power will begin to assume missions of global power projection, defending other dictatorships like Iran, Russia, aggressive regimes, perhaps like Algeria in the Middle East, working to secure bases in the South Pacific to isolate Australia and New Zealand, to build bases in the Indian Ocean, to further isolate India. One advantage the U.S. Navy has over China, nuclear submarines, the U.S. has 66 compared to China's 12. The U.S. also has a global network of international bases and relationships to aid its operations. China does not have a global network of bases yet, although it is working towards that goal. Something to note, U.S. shipbuilding production is hitting historic lows, plunging by over 85 percent since the 1950s. America now makes 0.2 percent of global commercial ships. The remaining 90 percent has been taken up by China, Japan and South Korea. Fisher said the U.S. needs to provide subsidies to revitalize the shipbuilding industry. Juliet Song, NTD News. The Milwaukee Tool Company is getting sued over alleged ties to forced labor in China. The plaintiff is a former prisoner of a Chinese jail. He claims he was forced to make work gloves with the Milwaukee Company's logo on them. Because the plaintiff still lives in China, he filed a lawsuit under the pseudonym Xu Lun. For safety reasons, Xu alleges that a Chinese company named Shanghai Select Safety Products outsourced its orders to the prison where he was incarcerated for his activism. Shanghai Select is allegedly a supplier of Milwaukee Tool gloves. Earlier this year, the U.S. government banned the import of goods from this company due to forced labor concerns. Milwaukee Tool denies the accusation and said it no longer has a relationship with Shanghai Select. The Power Tool brand, named after the Wisconsin city, is a subsidiary of a Chinese company. The Hong Kong-based TTI Group purchased the brand two decades ago. Subscribe to our partner platform, Epic TV, where you can watch our full episodes. Just click the link down below. Here's what to look out for in our second half. All roads lead back to China. A billion-dollar solar manufacturing project started in New Mexico as a purely domestic plan. But details suggest Chinese influence has been sneaking in. That's as American taxpayer money flows into a Chinese company. Military training and drills are in full force in Taiwan. The island ramping up preparation for a possible worst-case scenario. The island's president now asking soldiers to, quote, protect the country. Peace in the Taiwan Strait benefits global peace. And fast fashion shopping website Xi'an and Tmall are facing tough probes in Europe. The European Union demanding that the company submit answers in just two weeks' time. More on that after the break, here on China In Focus. Thanks for watching China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. See you soon.