Republicans’ tough talk doesn’t fit US-China relationship

Republican presidential candidate, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, gives a foreign policy speech on the campus of The Citadel, Friday, Aug. 28, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina. AP

CHARLESTON, South Carolina — If there was ever a week for the Republican presidential candidates to talk tough on China, this was it: Spurred by the stock market’s wild ride, they lashed out at the world’s most populous nation.

Scott Walker demanded President Barack Obama cancel an upcoming state visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Mike Huckabee said the next president should “build America’s economy, not China’s or Mexico’s.” Donald Trump said the US economy needs to “do a big uncoupling pretty soon, before it’s too late.”

Such rhetoric doesn’t always square with the realities of the relationship between the world’s two largest economies, said experts on America’s ties with China.

“When you’re in the early phases of the primary season, and you don’t have a lot in the way of foreign policy bona fides, a surefire applause line is to go to the extreme — and in the case of China, that’s always a very easy thing to do,” said Jon Huntsman, a former Republican governor and US ambassador to China under Obama.

No candidate went further than Trump, whose pledge to bring back to the US the roughly 2 million jobs lost to China since 1999 is a centerpiece of his campaign. “Not only now have they taken our jobs…but now they are pulling us down with them,” he said Monday amid a worldwide swoon in stock prices.

But “uncoupling” the US from China would mean undoing the largest trade relationship in the world: $592 billion in goods and services were exchanged last year. While most of that consists of US imports of Chinese products, China is still the United States’ third-largest export market.

General Motors has sold more cars in China than in the US every year since 2010. Apple’s second-largest market for its iPhones, iPads and computers is China.

“It would basically be economic suicide to cut yourself off from the second-largest and fastest-growing economy in the world,” said Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Walker said Obama needs to call off Xi’s planned visit next month — a response, he said, to China’s “increasing attempts to undermine US interests.”

Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the non-partisan Center for Strategic and International Studies, called that idea “the nuclear option” of diplomacy.

“That’s not the way that effective international policy is made,” she said.

Glaser said the US-China relationship is best managed by meetings between the chief executives of the two nations, due in no small part to the immense power Xi wields in Beijing.

“If we can persuade Xi Jinping to do something, it will happen,” she said. “That’s actually quite different from a democratic country.”

Some candidates have talked tough on China, only to face the realities of the relationship once in the White House.

Peter Feaver, a former National Security Council aide to both President George W. Bush and President Bill Clinton, recalled Clinton in 1992 calling the Chinese government “the butchers of Beijing” — a reference to the crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square. By the end of his first term, Clinton had bestowed “most-favored-nation” status on China, further cementing the two nations’ trade relationship.