US campaign ads hit at China
New York, With many Americans seized by anxiety about the country’s economic decline, candidates from both political parties have suddenly found a new villain to run against: China.
From the marquee battle between Senator Ms Barbara Boxer and Ms Carly Fiorina in California to the house contests in rural New York, Democrats and Republicans are blaming one another for allowing the export of jobs to its economic rival.
In the past week or so, at least 29 candidates have unveiled advertisements suggesting that their opponents have been too sympathetic to China and, as a result, Americans have suffered.
The ads are striking not only in their volume but also in their pointed language. One ad for an Ohio congressman, Mr Zack Space, accuses his Republican opponent, Mr Bob Gibbs, of supporting free-trade policies that sent Ohioans’ jobs to China. As a giant dragon appears on the screen, the narrator sarcastically thanks the Republican: “As they say in China, xie xie Mr Gibbs!” In an ad featuring Chinese music and a photo of Chairman Mao, Mr Spike Maynard, a Republican challenger in West Virginia, charges that Representative Mr Nick Rahall supported a bill creating wind-turbine jobs in China.
And on Wednesday, Senator Mr Harry Reid, the majority leader, began showing an ad that wove pictures of Chinese factory workers with criticism that Republican Ms Sharron Angle was “a foreign worker’s best friend” for supporting corporate tax breaks that led to outsourcing to China and India.
The barrage of ads, expected to total in the tens of millions of dollars, is occurring as politicians are struggling to address voters’ most pressing and stubborn concern: the lack of jobs.
“China is a really easy scapegoat,” said Ms Erika Franklin Fowler, a political science professor at Wesleyan University who is director of the Wesleyan media project, which tracks political advertising.
Polls show that not only are Americans increasingly worried that the US will have a lesser role in the years ahead; they are more and more convinced that China will dominate. In a Pew poll conducted in April, 41 per cent of Americans said China was the world’s leading economic power, slightly more than those who named the US. The attacks are occurring as trade tensions continue and the US is pressuring the Chinese government to allow its currency to rise in value, a central topic under discussion at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington this weekend.
The ads are so vivid and pervasive that some worry they will increase hostility toward the Chinese and complicate the already fraught relationship between the two countries.
Mr Robert A. Kapp, a former president of the US-China Business Council, said that even though tensions had flared in the past, he had never seen China used as such an obvious punching bag for American politicians.
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