Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg on China
According to the American political polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight, Bernie Sanders is emerging as the most likely candidate to go up against President Trump in the November 2020 presidential election.
Recently, Sanders was asked on CBS whether he thought China taking military action against Taiwan would elicit a military response from the United States. His response?
That’s something, yeah. I mean, I think we have got to make it clear to countries around the world that we will not sit by and allow invasions to take place, absolutely.
According to The China Project’s own presidential election China tracker, Sander’s somewhat unspecific answer is far from unusual. Views about China from the candidates run the gamut from what we are calling Panda Hugger to Panda Slugger.
Michael Bloomberg, who has perhaps the most detailed record on China other than former vice president Joe Biden, and is by far the most Chinese-government-friendly candidate, had this to say in response to the question “How far would you go to force China to reduce those emissions and tackle the climate crisis?”
Well, you’re not going to go to war with them. You have to negotiate with them and try to — and we’ve seen how well that works with tariffs that are hurting us. What you have to do is convince the Chinese that it is in their interest, as well. Their people are going to die just as our people are going to die. And we’ll work together.
In all fairness, the Chinese have slowed down. It’s India that is an even bigger problem. But it is an enormous problem.
The New York Times fact-checked Bloomberg on this claim that India “is an even bigger problem.” It found:
This is false. China’s emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, rose last year from 2018, according to the International Energy Agency. In fact, emissions have risen each year since 2017, after having declined in 2015 and 2016. Experts say China had been stimulating its economy to try to keep up growth rates. Industrial coal burning is the largest source of greenhouse gases in China, which remains the world’s largest emitter.
—Lucas Niewenhuis
