Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Guest contributor Thomas Lee wrote the lead story in China Note this week.
Amid a global pandemic and a summer of natural disasters and social unrest in the United States, it might be easy to forget that the country is still locked in a destructive trade war with China. Not that China itself is far from the minds of the two major U.S. presidential candidates, especially President Donald Trump. During last week’s Republican National Convention, Trump not surprisingly went full throttle on bashing China in his acceptance speech, going as far to say that “China would own the United States” if his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, won the election.
And Trump has recently backed up his words with action: He issued an executive order banning TikTok and slapped sanctions on companies helping China build artificial islands in the contested South China Sea. But the trade war itself has received scant attention, which is unfortunate since the tariffs and other trade restrictions have arguably done more direct damage to Americans than Chinese video-sharing apps and man-made islands thousands of miles away.