After the dust had settled on the US elections and President Barack Obama was re-elected, eye-popping numbers started to emerge from the post-mortem stories that attempted to impose order on months of nasty campaigning. Campaign spending was predicted to exceed a record-breaking $6 billion, nearly $1 billion of that spent on advertising for the presidential campaign alone.
And then there were the numbers that illuminated the role China played in this year’s US election.
According to research by the University of Southern California’s US-China Institute, candidates–both presidential candidates as well as candidates in 18 House and Senate races–in 2012 aired ads that mentioned China in 25 states. (USC lists the ads for the presidential races here, and Congressional and Senate races here.) Bloomberg reported that in a one-month period ending on Sept. 24, the two presidential candidates aired 29,613 ads mentioning China.
Whether it was Gov. Mitt Romney saying he would name China a currency manipulator on “day one” and claiming that Obama had not done enough to stop China’s “cheating” or Obama accusing Romney of shipping US jobs to China during his tenure at Bain Capital, the candidates used China in the fight to place blame for America’s current economic woes.
These claims may seem like cheap shots at China, but they’re grounded in Americans’ fears about their own country’s economy. The Pew Global Attitudes Project reported that though roughly two-thirds of Americans say US relations with China are good, the majority of the public is uneasy about China’s impact on the US economy. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say that China’s US debt holdings are a very serious problem; 71 % expressed concern about loss of American jobs to China; and six in 10 Americans were worried about the US trade deficit with China.
This is not the first time US politicians have used China as a scapegoat to get votes. Manycommentators have noted that Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush took aggressive stances against China during election season—only to take a more pragmatic approach to the relationship once in office.
But this fear of Chinese stealing jobs and cheating goes back much further than Reagan. In the 19th century, when Chinese immigrants replaced striking workers and built the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, novels, newspaper editorials, and cartoons depicted the morally bereft caricatures of Chinese people who would work for low wages in jobs once held by white, American men.
The overt racial superiority of white men depicted in 19th century propaganda is largely a thing of the past, but the underlying economic unease with China has continued into the 21st century.
Will this level of China-bashing last much longer? The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos argued that 2012 would be viewed as the year China bashing went mainstream. Future political candidates will no doubt continue to place blame on China for persistent economic problems—there is, after all, little actual or political costs to doing so.
While Chinese and American economies are likely to remain intertwined for years to come, the dynamics are already shifting. China holds less American debt that it did a year ago, andJapan is projected to overtake China as America’s largest foreign holder of Treasury securities by January 2013.
Chinese firms could employ up to 400,000 Americans by 2020, fueled by increasing Chinese investment in the United States, according to researchers at the Rhodium Group. (Chinese firms employ 27,000 Americans today.)
That’s another presidential election year. Only time will tell whether the political rhetoric shifts along with both countries’ changing economies, but if Americans begin to see more of the benefits of the US relationship with China, perhaps US politicians of the future will have to find someone else to blame for the problems of the day.