My problem with Chinese metrics generally is that they're so massaged that it's hard to believe their numbers are accurate
Yeah, they pump up a lot of industries like construction to arbitrarily hit their central targets. It takes a lot to dig into, but you can find the rough 'truth' of their numbers by looking at how it breaks down across industries, the debt their central government holds, and things that I'd need to be getting paid for as an economist to get a 'true' metric for, but that's a part of why I didn't want to emphasize their overall numbers. Everyone knows they probably aren't hitting 6%, but it's moreso that you do see a dip after the trade war and then it rises back up.
Huawei was for a time excluded from the Western infrastructure was definitely a sore spot and impacted them significantly.
This one and the Trump admin's 5g efforts are the actually big hits of their admin against China. I somewhat decouple it from the tradewar stuff because it wasn't necessarily based on "they're screwing us over economically" like his steel or soybeans items, and more because of genuine security concerns.
If anything, the State Department became far more aggressive in creating a regional network of allies to hold back the Chinese, and was much more confrontational regarding the South China Sea. Pompeo may have been a bloviating jackass at times but he was pretty solid when it came to combatting the Chinese.
In terms of regional military security, it's column a & column b. The Trump admin's dedication to the region was well-received, and it made some efforts to coordinate more regional opposition to Chinese initiatives. However, outside of Japan (which already hated China for the
Senkaku Islands dispute), and India (which hates them for
the border clashes), the Trump admin may have had the wrong approach in the right direction. Forcing powers like Vietnam or Korea to choose between China OR the US was a bit too strongarmed, and even during the Cold War wasn't the best policy of west-warm but technically-neutral powers.
This story goes a little into the details of why a harsh-but-not-binary strategy may yield better results.
Nevertheless, the Trump admin does deserve credit for sounding the horn on China, however imperfectly. Clinton may have, but it's unclear; the Uighurs were being covered during the Obama admin, even by the glowies at
Radio Free Asia, and his administration didn't do much. It's reasonable to believe Clinton may have also done little, but the Biden admin thusfar has stuck to the starker tone of "genocide" for the Uighurs, which is a good sign.
Brazil, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic last week joined the U.S-led Clean Network initiative meant to ensure that ...
www.theepochtimes.com
I don't really see an issue with this article itself, but for completeness' sake I just want to mention that epoch times is a falun gong outlet which always has an anti-china spin, so it can sometimes be good to grab a more 'neutral' source like ap or reuters that repeats the same thing to waterproof your gist from that charge. Trump admin did good on 5g