Commerce Secretary: US Needs to Work With Europe to Slow China’s Innovation

Gina Raimondo favors hardline trade policies against China

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo stepped up her rhetoric against Beijing on Tuesday and said the US has to work with European allies to slow China’s “innovation.”

“America is most effective when we work with our allies,” Raimondo told CNBC. “If we really want to slow down China’s rate of innovation, we need to work with Europe.”

Raimondo has made it clear that she favors the hardline trade policies of the Trump administration, including tariffs and export blacklists. Like President Biden, Raimondo wants to get allies to go along with these hardline policies.

“We don’t want autocratic governments like China, writing the rules of the road. We together with our allies, who care about privacy, freedom, individual rights, individual protection, we need to write the rules of the road,” Raimondo said.

The US often accuses China of exporting technology with backdoors Beijing can exploit for surveillance purposes. But the US doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to these accusations considering the global surveillance the US has conducted through the NSA, as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Also on Tuesday, Raimondo accused China of blocking Chinese airline companies from buying Boeing airplanes. “There’s tens of billions of dollars of planes that Chinese airlines want to buy but the Chinese government is standing in the way,” she said.

Author: Dave DeCamp

Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.