What Kamala Harris Said About China

As presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris prepares to formally accept her party's nomination later this month, her stance on U.S.-China relations will likely be a focus of discussion ahead of her showdown with former President Donald Trump.

The following is a look at what Harris has said and done about China and its all-important diplomatic relationship.

According to a Pew Research poll released in late April, China is a major foreign policy concern for nearly half of Americans. A Gallup poll released the previous month showed that more than 40% of Americans view China as America's number one enemy.

Despite President Joe Biden's November meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping aimed at easing tensions, Washington and Beijing are engaged in a range of disputes, from trade to nuclear weapons to TikTok.

“Kamala Harris is a CCP sympathizer and her record shows she will bow to China at America’s expense,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said. Newsweek.

Newsweek contacted Harris' presidential campaign and the Chinese Embassy in the United States through written requests for comment.

In an argument with then-Vice President Mike Pence in Salt Lake City, Utah, in October 2020, Harris launched a scathing attack on the Trump administration's trade war, which imposed tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods.

“You lost that trade war, you lost it. What happened is that because of a so-called trade war with China, America lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs. Farmers went bankrupt because of it. We’re in a manufacturing recession because of it,” she said.

Trade with the world's second-largest economy continues to be a focus of the Biden administration, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others accusing Beijing of allegedly flooding foreign markets with electric vehicles and other goods to offset weak Chinese consumer confidence.

In May, the president announced that he would not only maintain Trump-era tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese imports, but also increase them on categories worth $18 billion.

As tensions continue to escalate between the world's two largest economies after Biden ordered the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon and ahead of the president's high-profile meeting with Xi in California in November, Harris stressed that the bilateral relationship is about “reducing risk” rather than decoupling.

“This is not about withdrawing, but about ensuring that we protect American interests and that we are a leader in terms of the rules of the road, rather than following other people's rules,” Harris told CBS in September in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.

She was attending a summit of Southeast Asian nations, a group of countries at the center of tensions between Washington and Beijing. There she accused China of “harassing” its neighbors in the South China Sea, over which it claims sovereignty and through which more than a fifth of global trade passes each year.

The photo echoes remarks Harris made in Hanoi, Vietnam, in August 2021, when she called for increased pressure on Beijing over its sovereignty claims.

“We must find ways to put pressure, to increase pressure… on Beijing to respect the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and to challenge its bullying and excessive maritime claims,” ​​she told then-Vietnamese President Nguyen Xuan Phuc.

Chinese state media called her visit to Vietnam a “set-up” and accused her of “sowing discord” in the country.

China has long been embroiled in territorial disputes with several maritime neighbors. Its conflict with the Philippines over that country's internationally recognized exclusive economic zone has resulted in dramatic clashes and several injuries among Filipinos.

The Southeast Asian country has a seven-decade-old mutual defense treaty with the United States

Harris' only face-to-face meeting with Xi to date came during a brief exchange on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Bangkok, Thailand, in November 2022.

The vice president said she underscored the message Biden delivered to Xi during their meeting at the G20 summit in Bali a few days earlier: the importance of keeping the lines of communication open to “responsibly manage competition between our countries.”

On Taiwan, the self-ruled democracy that China claims as its territory, Harris expressed support for continuing the decades-old U.S. policy of supporting its self-defense.

During her tenure as the junior senator from California before being chosen as Biden's running mate in 2020, Harris repeatedly championed human rights issues involving China, including co-sponsoring a bill to sanction Hong Kong officials involved in Beijing's campaign to crush democracy in that city.

She was a co-sponsor of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019, signed into law by President Trump.

The legislation requires the State Department to provide regular reports on the situation in Xinjiang, where Chinese authorities have forced hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities into camps in a campaign that human rights groups call cultural genocide.

China denied the reports and said the camps were educational centers.