In an interview with Fox News on July 9, 2023, the Governor of Florida and the American Republican presidential candidate Ron de Santis said he supported revoking China’s permanent normal trade status. He also said he would aim to revoke the status of winning the 2024 White House Race.
Normal Trade Status is a legal designation for free trade with a foreign nation for the US. “I favour doing that/ I think we probably need the Congress, but I would like to take executive actions as appropriate to be able to move in that direction,” he said.
We are going to have a new commitment to hard power in the Indo-Pacific. At the end of the day, what China respects is strength,” he added. And if you are showing strength, and we have hard power to back it up, they are not going to be much less aggressive, he added.
“And my fear is that Biden, his weakness, is inviting China to do more, not just in their own theatre, and we have seen them doing more in our hemisphere here in the West,” he said.
During the Interview, he also called Joe Biden totally compromised,” He said that the US was compelled to take millions of dollars from other countries like China.
“We have a corrupt and incompetent leader in Joe Biden,” he said
“I think that we need to recognise this new experiment with the CCP (Chinese Communist Party)Over the last three decades where they were granted the status of the most favoured nations, put in the World Trade Organisation, that has been a failure,” De Santis said.
We need independence from China. We cannot subcontract the key aspects of our industrial base to a country that does not have our interests at heart.
In the interview, Santis also called the Peoples’s Republic of China (PRC) the number one geopolitical threat this country faces.”
The ties between the US and China have hardened over the years. The relations have been strained on various accounts of Beijing’s national security issues, such as Taiwan, which China sees as its own.
Moreover, the US-led export bans on Chinese technologies and human rights issues in China coupled with a Washington-led study into the origins of the COVID Pandemic as the SARS-CoV-2 have soured relations.
The US Senate voted in 2000 to grant that status to China as it prepared to join the World Trade Organisation. Any step to remove it would also need congressional approval too.
Donald Trump, the front runner of the Republican field with De Santis as a distant second, recently said that he would give China two days to get out of what reports suggest is a Chinese spy facility in Cuba, 90 miles off the US Coast.
Also, Beijing’s terms with Moscow, despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine, parked tensions between the West and China. Apart from Taiwan, there is friction in areas such as US export bans on advanced technologies, trade tariffs etc.
Washington has been trying to repair ties between the two of the world’s largest economies. The US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said over the weekend that the meetings with senior officials in recent days were direct and productive, helping stabilize the superpowers’ often rocky relationship as her four-day trip to Beijing ended.
Earlier this year, the US unanimously approved legislation that it would make US policy to oppose China’s continued classification as a developing country in international organisations. Among those organisations is the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which gives China access to developmental assistance loans on referential terms along with access to special and differential treatment intending to boost its trading opportunities.
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