28 United States The EconomistMarch 28th 2020
F
aced with the first great crisis of his presidency, Donald
Trump fell back on his go-to tactic: blame China. His decision
in January to bar non-American visitors from the country appears
to have been his only prompt action against the coronavirus. After
that failed to prevent it penetrating America’s borders, he has been
insisting on China’s responsibility for the pathogen.
While the disease was concentrated in China, Mr Trump called
it by its approved name, coronavirus. Since its arrival in America
he has referred to it, in daily tweets and briefings, as the “China vi-
rus”. Others in his administration use “Wuhan virus”, including
Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state. He is reported to have de-
manded the g7 group of industrial countries call it by that name. A
White House staffer is said to prefer the phrase “kung flu”.
It is easy to see what Mr Trump is about. He wants to distract
from his administration’s failure to contain the disease—such that
America, despite having had months to prepare for it, will soon
have more covid-19 cases than China. He also sees in the issue an
opportunity to own the libs. A note circulated by Mr Trump’s re-
election campaign last week suggests that it plans to make the
president’s fearlessness in uttering the phrase “China virus” a de-
fining difference between him and his presumed Democratic op-
ponent, Joe Biden. In 2016 Mr Trump portrayed Hillary Clinton’s
aversion to the unhelpful phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” as
weak; he has updated the tactic.
Yet what candidate Mr Trump said in 2016 and what America’s
president says are different matters. China has responded angrily
to his administration’s slurs. Where recent pandemics—including
the 2014 west African Ebola outbreak—saw productive Sino-Amer-
ican co-operation, this one has taken the already-poor relations
between Mr Trump and Xi Jinping to new lows.
And they are liable to worsen, despite efforts on both sides to
rein in the rhetoric this week. Mr Trump appears set on a campaign
of China-baiting which America’s looming recession and death
toll will make more feverish, especially as the virus spreads to Re-
publican-voting states. China-watchers warn of a rising risk of a
“low probability, high consequence” upset. In the best case, one
opines, the relationship with China will be “utterly broken”.
The best way to lower the tension would be if Mr Trump’s diver-sionary tactic failed. But this would require his supporters to de-
nounce his handling of the virus, of which there is currently no
sign. Republicans admire it. And even if their faith wobbled, Mr
Trump’s China-bashing would be likelier to sustain his popularity
on the right than to endanger it.
This reflects more than Republicans’ traditional hawkishness.
Bashing China unites two of the Republicans’ main factions: na-
tional-security sorts, who dislike Mr Trump’s protectionism but
like his belligerence, and economic populists, who are wary of mil-
itarism but love the tariffs. By extension, it is also one of the ways
the Republican establishment, which dominates the former
group, has made peace with Mr Trump. No wonder ambitious Re-
publicans, who try to keep a foot in both camps, sound especially
hawkish. They include Mr Pompeo, who calls China’s ruling party
“the central threat of our times”.
Discernible, too, amid the Republican mistrust of China is a
fear of national decline that looks like an accompaniment to white
conservatives’ dread of the socio-demographic currents that
threaten the party. In a tweet this week, Newt Gingrich, a Trump
loyalist and former presidential candidate, lamented that Huawei,
a Chinese telecoms firm emblematic of state capitalism, was dis-
pensing medical supplies while “our once great telecommunica-
tions companies have lost their entrepreneurial drive.”
This helps explain why Republicans find it easy to ignore the
obvious expediency of Mr Trump’s latest China-bashing. It also ex-
plains why few appear to have registered that his antagonistic Chi-
na policy has not achieved much. His tariffs have been ruinous to
American farmers and consumers and won no big concessions
from China on any of the issues, such as intellectual-property
theft, they were supposed to address. The need to confront China
has been embraced by many Republicans as an ideological impera-
tive, requiring no supporting evidence of its wisdom.
And yet the pandemic also points to other ways in which Mr
Trump’s policy has backfired. In line with its general disregard for
science and civilian expertise, the administration slashed the Cen-
tres for Disease Control’s China-based staff—the potential focal
point for Sino-American pandemic co-operation—ahead of the
outbreak. Instead of rallying its allies in a global response to the
pandemic, it has continued to alienate them. Mr Trump gave the
Europeans no forewarning of his plan to bar non-American visi-
tors from their countries this month. Instead of rising above Chi-
na’s propagandists, he got into the mud with them.Sino’ the times
Earlier this month Mr Trump was lambasted for having allegedly
tried to buy a promising German coronavirus vaccine for Ameri-
ca’s exclusive use. He would do better to reignite the liberal values
and openness to talent upon which America’s economic dyna-
mism is based. Last week Propublica, a news website, described
how a Chinese scientist, Weihong Tan, was hounded from the Uni-
versity of Florida last year by federal restrictions on scientists with
ties to China. Now at Hunan University, he switched from cancer
research and created a faster test for covid-19. And Mr Trump’s re-
cent rhetoric, which has helped inspire a surge in hate crimes
against Asian-Americans, cannot have tempted him to return.
Mr Trump’s effort to redefine relations with China as funda-
mentally competitive may prove to be his most enduring legacy.
Contrary to his politicking, even Democrats now see the relation-
ship in those terms. His management of it, as the pandemic high-
lights, is a different story: it shows how America can lose. 7Lexington Sore and feverish
Relations between China and America have caught a virus