Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who also served as ambassador to Singapore, Russia and China and was a 2012 Republican presidential candidate, discussed multiple issues involving the United States and China during a Nov. 16 webcast sponsored by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.
Stephen Orlins, president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, said audiences in more than 80 venues throughout the United States, Canada and China took part in the organization’s 16th annual China Town Hall. Huntsman and Orlins also took several questions from members of the audience.
They talked about trade and the negative impact of tariffs between nations.
“In a time of inflation, in a time of slack economic performance, what's the worst thing you can have in a trading relationship? It's tariffs. And in this case that reached 27.5%,” Huntsman said. “My day job is in the car business, working for Ford Motor Co. And when we look at bilateral trade, which has reached numbers that would represent the largest trading relationship in a sense the world has ever known, that doesn't serve consumers, that doesn't serve economic growth and stability. It then becomes a political question.
“Will the political bodies and individuals that are responsible for this, will they have the right stuff to be able to change that tariff schedule?” he said. “I'm not totally confident that that will happen. I hope that it does because we need a kind of a fresh start on the trade and economic side.”
Orlins said tariffs punish lower-income Americans more than the wealthy and lead to trade distortions.
“And isn't it kind of puzzling that the Biden administration has not kind of harvested that low-hanging fruit of cutting those tariffs?” he asked.
Huntsman, saying he spoke from experience in the region and on this issue, agreed.
“To me, as a former trade negotiator, as someone who's worked on U.S.-China trade and trade throughout the Asia Pacific region, I see trade as our most powerful weapon," he said. “And this should be all about the people of the United States and the people of China. We have differing governance systems and, obviously, different ideological priorities. But people-to-people we do pretty well. But the people-the-people stuff is supercharged by way of economics and trade."
Huntsman said the political environment is so heated that if anyone steps in that direction is viewed as weak.
“And we have to get to a point where we're beyond the point-scoring. We're doing what's right for our people,” he said. “We're doing what's right for U.S. citizens and consumers and long-term, the stability of a bilateral relationship that left to his own devices will become more and more estranged. And that's a dangerous place for it to be. So what is the glue? It’s trade.”
With Republicans soon to control the U.S. House of Representatives, with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) the likely speaker, Orlins asked how that will impact trade.
“He's going to have a very thin majority," Huntsman said. "I said earlier that I think we've way underplayed our hand on trade. So part of an extension of our national interests is interacting with our friends and allies in the Asia-Pacific region. And what do they want? Well, obviously they want dialog in a lot of different areas, but they want to trade.
"And I think the best way to shore up our presence in the region is through trade. And so the committee assignments and who chairs these committees is going to be really important.”
Huntsman said economic growth is of paramount importance to China. It has been forced to adapt, including after the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising was quashed, leading to increased tensions between the U.S. and China.
“So what happened in the years after that? They supercharged economic growth because investment fell to practically zero,” Huntsman said. “And they had to supercharge economic growth because that was the only remedy for domestic stability, creating jobs and growth and an opportunity for people.”
Orlins said National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan talks about invest, align and compete.
“The aligned portion of that is our allies and friends around the world. We need to have a policy that is consistent among our friends and allies. Why is that important and are we doing it?” Orlins asked.
“First of all we have to have a network of allies and friends to project our values,” Huntsman said. “And we are who we are as Americans. We have certain values, and they're inherent to who we are as people and our national journey and our national experience and gladly some of those values, such as human rights and the importance of democratic principles, are shared by other countries. And so, yes, indeed, we are better and stronger and more stable as a world when we align with like-minded countries."
There is action on this issue in Congress. The Countering Communist China Act, released by the Republican Study Committee, is a counterproposal to Sen. Charles Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) Endless Frontier Act.
The bill focuses on strengthening the military, as well as sanctions enforcement and law enforcement capabilities to counter China. It calls for modernizing U.S. law to stop Chinese IP theft and would hold China accountable for its malign influence operations, including possible involvement in spreading COVID-19.
The fact that the House will soon be under Republican control is an extenuating factor. Orlins said the question is are there enough pro-free trade Republicans to combine with Democrats to get negotiating authority for the president to restart those discussions for joining the TPP?
Huntsman was asked by a medical student how countries, particularly the U.S. and China, could be incentivized to collaborate when the next highly contagious disease strikes to avoid the same amount of vast damage and destruction that COVID-19 caused.
He said when he was the ambassador to China, he asked the secretary for Health and Human Services in the United States about collaboration in health care.
“So what is good for humanity? That's the question that I had,” Huntsman said. “If you stop to conclude that between the United States and China, we have some of the best, the smartest medical practitioners, researchers in the world, supplemented by some of the best laboratory facilities anywhere on Earth.
“When you look at the laboratory, a lot of them were from China," he added. "And it dawned on me that, ‘OK, if this is the case in many of our laboratories in the United States, why aren't we pooling knowledge and collaborating a little more deeply around human disease?’ Because human disease strikes everybody. It strikes the people in China. It strikes people in the United States and beyond. So as it relates to COVID, that's a no-brainer."
Orlins noted that China is experiencing a very severe COVID-19 outbreak, with 14,000 to 15,000 new cases a day.
Huntsman said economics has long served as kind of a stabilizer in the bilateral relationship.
“This could have a real negative impact, a real toll on that stabilizing element. How they get out of it is clearly up to them,” he said. “My sense is they'll begin to open up a little bit more because the pressure is on the pre-Party Congress, to keep it at zero or to ensure that Xi Jinping's political legitimacy is in no way threatened by a massive outbreak.”
Huntsman was asked about a recently imposed total ban on five technology exports to China semiconductor industry. How will that impact the industry and the U.S. economy.
“So this was specific to the CHIPS Act," he said. "I think one aspect of the bilateral relationship we're going to see supercharged and one that I think is good actually is bringing out the competitive features of our bilateral relationship because we're good competitors, we do it well.” he said. “And that brings out the best in innovation. If we're competing, we're probably less directly hostile to one another.
“Competition is good, and we've been at a disadvantage with respect to certain key product inputs to some of our finished products because of the migration overseas of critical components, including semiconductors,” Huntsman added.
He said he is, by nature, an advocate of free trade.
Orlins asked if the U.S. labor force can handle this challenge.
“We're about to find out,” Huntsman said. “But I will tell you, as a former governor, we don't have nearly enough of our young kids who are going into the STEM field. Where China might be graduating a quarter of all STEM grads globally every year, we are not. And maybe this gives us an opportunity.”
He said governors need to develop the workers who will be needed.
“That means we're going to work with public education, our universities, to make sure that we're producing enough stuff. That's all part of the competitive equation,” Huntsman said.
The former governor was asked about anti-Asian discrimination in criminal cases against Chinese-Americans suspected of espionage. Huntsman said the issue hits close to home for him.
“And it gets right kind of to my heart because my daughter is Chinese-American and I live in a state that was home to a place called Topaz, which was an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during the World War II years," he said. "I've been to Topaz many, many times. I went there as governor and helped to kind of put it more on the map, because I think it tells an important story about what happens when we go to extremes in this country and the impact it can have still felt for generations following those decisions.
“There are legitimate national security issues on a people-to-people level. I had to deal with them in China a lot,” he said. “I think we have to be very careful and very smart about how we define national security, because there is a national security role in all of this that should not be forgotten, but letting it wander off to some extremes, we've learned those lessons in the past about what happens, and I would hope that our government would be smart enough to learn those lessons.”