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“President Donald Trump urged world leaders to hold China accountable for the spread of the coronavirus, in a video address to a scaled-down U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday.” AP News
“A U.S. judge early Sunday blocked the Trump administration from requiring Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google to remove Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat for downloads.” Reuters
“President Donald Trump said Saturday he’s given his ‘blessing’ to a proposed deal that would see the popular video-sharing app TikTok partner with Oracle and Walmart and form a U.S. company… TikTok said Oracle and Walmart could acquire up to a cumulative 20% stake in the new company in a financing round to be held before an initial public offering of stock, which Walmart said could happen within the next year. Oracle’s stake would be 12.5%, and Walmart’s would be 7.5%, the companies said in separate statements.” AP News
The right is critical of China’s behavior and supports banning the apps.
“As the Communist Party chairman offered [a] noble rallying cry for the democratic rule of law, the Second Intermediate People's Court of Beijing was simultaneously proving the boss a total liar. The court did so by announcing that Ren Zhiqiang has been sentenced to 18 years in prison. What was Ren's crime, you might ask? Calling Xi a ‘clown.’…
“Ren's sentence proves only that Xi is an increasingly paranoid leader unable to tolerate questions. Xi certainly wants to make clear to his population that Ren is an example of what happens when citizens ask questions. Ren is 69 years old, so his 18-year incarceration is a de facto death sentence. Tuesday showed two Xi's: the Xi who smiles as he lies to the world and the Xi who enforces tyranny at home.”
Tom Rogan, Washington Examiner
“A new bill introduced by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) would give the United States important leverage in halting Beijing’s rampant abuses…
The senator’s proposal would replace China’s permanent trade status with a variant of the annual review that prevailed before 2001. Under that system, the president must extend China’s trade status each year, subject to Congress’s disapproval. The president would also have to review China’s behavior across a host of areas, including human rights, the use of slave labor and whether it engaged in or condoned industrial spying and intellectual property theft…
“Cotton’s bill establishes a carrot-and-stick relationship with China. If it wants the economic benefits of trading with the United States, and by extension with the West, it must adhere in some fashion to Western norms. If it does, then the threat to the United States is diminished. If it doesn’t, we should not finance our own destruction.”
Henry Olsen, Washington Post
“For years, Beijing has been all too happy to fill the regional void left by the United States [in the Pacific], having recognized the immense value of the area’s resource rich oceans, as well as how a permanent Chinese presence in the Western Pacific could complicate America’s ability to respond to potential crises in Asia…
“While denigrating China may feel good in the moment, it alone is unlikely to move the proverbial needle. Instead, members of the U.S. delegation should be prepared to humbly listen to Pacific Island leaders’ genuine concerns about climate change, unfair global trade practices, and the impact of China’s illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing on their economies and coastal waters…
“Successful political outcomes will depend on regular, high-level outreach to these countries, as well as prioritizing American diplomatic and economic engagement at important multi-lateral bodies such as the Pacific Island Forum and Association of Southeast Asian Nations.”
Craig Singleton, Washington Examiner
Regarding the apps, “Trump has unnecessarily complicated his handling of TikTok. His administration identified a series of concerns that could only be resolved by a sale to U.S. investors, and ByteDance now says that a total sale of the app, due to Chinese government export regulations, is off the table. By the president’s own standard, the right course of action is simple: Ban TikTok. It’s entirely possible that Trump eventually rejects the Oracle deal, but the sweeteners written into it — such as the 25,000 U.S.-based jobs that TikTok says it would create — have persuaded him to seriously weigh, and approve ‘in concept,’ a significantly flawed proposal.”
Jimmy Quinn, National Review
“While some users have found creative ways to evade algorithms that automatically block content, WeChat serves as a Communist Party tool at home and abroad… Many have complained about being censored and blocked for sharing politically sensitive content. ‘Communications conducted entirely among non-China-registered accounts are subject to pervasive content surveillance that was previously thought to be exclusively reserved for China-registered accounts,’ Canadian research outfit Citizen Lab reported in May…
“By the way, criticisms from the left that the Trump Administration is bifurcating the internet are a little late. Beijing already bans Facebook, Twitter and any messaging app it can’t control. The Administration’s straightforward handling of WeChat stands as a striking contrast to the political auction it has conducted over TikTok. Issues of national security should be addressed on the merits, not used as leverage for meddling in business decisions.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
The left is critical of Trump’s speech and policies, and skeptical of banning the apps.
The left is critical of Trump’s speech and policies, and skeptical of banning the apps.
“There were many inaccuracies, as well as one comically misleading claim, in [Trump’s] speech. First, while U.S. and Kurdish military forces did wipe out the ISIS caliphate (accelerating a strategy developed under President Barack Obama), an estimated 18,000 ISIS fighters remain in Syria and Iraq, and U.S. forces are still battling against them. Second, the accords he cited were not ‘peace’ agreements. Serbia and Kosovo normalized economic relations (their peace deal was signed in the 1990s); ditto for Israel’s deals with Bahrain and the UAE (countries with which it was never at war)…
“Trump was correct that, last year, the U.S. lowered carbon emissions more steeply than any other nation, but he failed to explain why. It had nothing to do with Trump’s policies. It was due entirely to market forces—the rising demand for natural gas (and, to some extent, renewable sources of energy) displacing the demand for coal. The irony is that Trump has lashed out at renewables (claiming, for instance, that wind turbines cause cancer) and has called for a revival of the coal industry (fruitlessly because of the aforementioned market factors).”
Fred Kaplan, Slate
“‘If I’m elected… you won’t lose one plant, I promise you that,’ [Trump] told Michigan voters at a rally in October 2016… Fiat Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford have all closed plants [in Michigan] since Trump’s brash campaign trail commitments. Auto companies as a whole reduced their investment in the state by 29% over the three full years of Trump’s presidency, compared with the previous three years under Obama…
“In manufacturing-heavy Ohio, Trump’s tit-for-tat tariff battle with China was a major factor in the drop in annual job growth from 36,200 in 2016 to 3,700 in 2019… Where were U.S. manufacturing companies investing? China… In 2019, U.S. firms invested $14 billion in China — more than in 2016, the year Trump was elected… Trump’s brute force tactics with China have backfired.”
John Cavanagh, USA Today
“When the United States walks away from cooperative bodies — from the Paris climate accord to the WHO — it leaves behind a vacuum. China has hastened to fill it, and that, more than anything, is bolstering Beijing’s rise and influence. It gives China a chance to be a good guy — say, pledging $30 million to the WHO when the US threatened to withdraw, a fraction of the money the US provides annually. The Trump administration, in abandoning institutions for being too China-centric, is allowing them to become just that…
“The Trump administration isn’t wrong to call out China [for] its misdeeds… But the US also failed to offer an alternative vision of global leadership other than everyone looking out for themselves.”
Jen Kirby, Vox
Regarding the apps, “If ByteDance retains 80 percent control over [TikTok], as it asserts, that would undermine the stated purpose of the deal — which was to, you know, force ByteDance to give up control of TikTok. On the other hand, if ByteDance is forced to give up control, China seems likely to block the deal…
“If you thought that Trump’s negotiations with ByteDance were about producing some specific outcome, you might imagine that he would blanch at the terms the company has reached with its investors. But if you assume, as I did, that his negotiations were primarily about projecting power and influence, whatever reality lurked in the details, then all of this is proceeding more or less to plan.”
Casey Newton, The Verge
“WeChat has always been under greater threat of a ban in the United States than TikTok, and it also poses a greater threat. Where surveillance carried out via TikTok appears so far to be a hypothetical, on WeChat it is a documented reality — with the privacy of Chinese Americans in greatest danger… Authorities back home in China have knocked on the doors of U.S. users’ family members, evidently after observing critical comments on the app…
“A U.S. ban, however, would mimic this bad behavior, and implicitly accept it as a model for the rest of the world that has not yet determined what kind of global Internet it will help build: a splintered system of national cyber-sovereignty, or one as open as the Web’s architects had hoped… Ad-hoc bans of individual properties whenever a president wants to score political points aren’t productive; objective security and anti-censorship criteria for foreign companies, with full-scale bans only as a measure of last resort, might be.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
