Trump’s Path to Victory Runs Through China

Ed Rendell, former Pennsylvania governor and major Hillary Clinton surrogate, is no Donald Trump fan, but he acknowledged the presumptive Republican nominee for president has tapped into populist anger about trade.

“He’s right about China,” Rendell told Sirius XM’s “The Dean Obeidallah Show” last week. “We have, for some reason, not stood up to China, and we’ve allowed them to manipulate their currency, which gives their businesses tremendous advantages in selling to America.”

“Trump, Rendell, Bernie Sanders — everybody seems to get it but Hillary.”

There is, perhaps, no other issue with as much potential to peel away Democratic-leaning voters from the former secretary of state.

“Trump, Rendell, Bernie Sanders — everybody seems to get it but Hillary,” China expert Peter Navarro told LifeZette. “It’s going to be a defining issue in the election.”

A slew of polls over the last couple of years suggests that Americans remain hostile to international trade deals in general — and suspicious of China in particular.

A March survey conducted by Democratic pollster Pat Caddell found that by a margin of 66 percent to 13 percent, Americans believe China is actively trying to undermine the United States to advance its own economic and national interests.

The same poll also found that 28 percent of Americans think the United States is “totally ignoring” potential military and economic threats posed by China. Another 47 percent think America is compromising its national security and economic interests by relying on China to produce consumer goods and finance U.S. government debt. Some 53 percent wanted the Obama administration to take a harder line on Chinese computer hacking.

A Pew Research Center survey last year showed large majorities of Americans see debt held by China, lost jobs, cyber attacks, the trade deficit, and China’s growing military power as somewhat or very serious problems in the U.S.-Sino relationship. Republicans were more likely to express concern on those issues, but significant percentages of Democrats held similar views.

“People see the whole trade issue as part of a larger issue — America’s position in the world is slipping,” said Curtis Ellis, executive director of the American Jobs Alliance. “They see American economic power weakening, and they see actors like China humiliating America, challenging America.”

Ellis said Americans link that sense of American decline to their personal economic struggles.

“Trade becomes a vehicle issue fraught with all of the anxiety — personal and geostrategic,” he said. “It cuts across party lines … People feel the system is rigged against them.”

If China does take center stage in this year’s election, it could spell trouble for Clinton, Navarro said.

“The issue’s really important. China is really a microcosm and symbol of the bigger issue, which is the economy and trade,” said Navarro, author of “Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World,” and an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine. “It’s particularly important for Hillary Clinton, because it was Bill and Hillary Clinton who lobbied and shoehorned China into the World Trade Organization.”

In addition to its role as global economic competitor, Navarro said, China and Russia poses the two biggest security threats among foreign nations. Navarro said Clinton made a huge blunder as secretary of state when she set the tone early in her tenure for ignoring China’s human rights abuses in favor of rapprochement on issues like global warming.

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China has responded by taking advantage of America with a series of measures that harm its own people while keeping labor costs at rock-bottom levels, Navarro said. Among the abuses he cited are:

• Engaging in massive intellectual property theft. A 2013 study by the National Bureau for Asian Research estimated that Chinese intellectual property theft costs Americans companies $300 billion a year, costs America millions of jobs, and slows economic growth.
• Currency manipulation. It is by far the largest offender of the 20 nations that Peter G. Peterson Foundation say devalues their currency, accounting for about half of U.S. unemployment.
• Providing illegal export subsidies. The U.S. trade representative filed a complaint contending that the subsidies total $1 billion.
• Deplorable labor and environmental standards that make it impossible for American companies to compete. In addition to creating an uneven playing field, Navarro said those policies have created profound misery among the Chinese people. The World Health Organization estimates 600,000 Chinese people die each year because of air pollution. According to ChinaDaily USA, 66,000 peopled died in work-related accidents in 2014. And 600,000 die each year from overwork and stress, according to China Youth Daily.

Navarro said Trump, in a speech in Pennsylvania last month, laid out a tough, seven-point plan to confront China.

“We’ve basically kicked 20 million American workers to the Made-in-America curb,” Navarro said. “They’ve [Chinese leaders] had their way with the United States because they’ve had weak presidents to deal with since Clinton.”