Joe Biden, if he wins, will need to decide whether to scrap, keep or escalate the billions of tariffs levied against China by Donald Trump and whether to stick to or renegotiate the partial trade deal Trump signed in January. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said that Biden if he wins, should maintain a tough stance against China and focus more on industrial policy, a Reuters report reads.
Taimur Baig, chief economist and managing director at DBS Group Research, was reported as saying in a CNBC report, that technology-related tensions between China and the US won’t go away even if Joe Biden wins the elections.
Biden’s team has acknowledged that they expect the debate to have the China topic to be one of focus at the first debate between Trump and Biden, which is due to held on Tuesday night at Ohio. Biden advisers, over the week, have honed in on questions about the world’s second-largest economy – anticipating attacks from President Donald Trump on the former vice president’s record of dealing with Beijing. Biden would also need to take a stance on the several restrictions to cut off Chinese technology companies’ access to American intellectual property and tackle numerous of relationships across the region that could help, or complicate, tensions with China.
Krugman believes that relations with the two countries will become very bad if Trump is re-elected.
After alleging that China is stealing intellectual property and companies to transfer technology for access to China’s markets, the Trump administration in 2018-19, imposed tariffs of $370 billion in Chinese goods.
Biden is expected to prioritise investing in research and development and encourage US manufacturing to compete with Beijing than focus on trade as soon as he enters the White House. Biden, during his campaign, hasn’t gone into how he would deal with China. He sure will face a hard time in undoing the current policy.
Trump, on the other hand, has been frequently boasting that he is the toughest president and the first to take on the Asian giant. Biden’s campaign has criticised Trump for downplaying the threat of the virus as it spread in China.
“I will use tariffs when they are needed, but the difference between me and Trump is that I will have a strategy—a plan—to use those tariffs to win, not just to fake toughness,” Biden had said in a recent interview.
