Former Georgia Senator Joins Trump’s Kettle of China Hawks as US Ambassador to Beijing

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Former Georgia Senator and businessman David Perdue was recently confirmed with a bipartisan vote as the new US Ambassador to China, a post that had been vacant for roughly 4 months after the resignation of Nicholas Burns, also Trump-appointed, and the previous man to hold the post.

Accused of being a “China hawk” by a Beijing think tank, Perdue has indeed engaged in the more drastic rhetoric that characterizes the typical anti-China position in Washington. However, his true position may be slightly more nuanced than that.

For example, during the first Trump Administration, and before his tenure as Senator, Perdue defended his work with companies like Dollar General and Reebok that worked extensively in Asia, including through offshoring to countries like China. In office, he cautioned the use of tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum in 2018, saying that if such measures were imposed, they would have to be “very targeted”.

A year later, Perdue had changed his stance, claiming that it was the first time in 5 decades, which would infer as far back as the Nixon Administration, since the US was “standing up to the Chinese and other trading partners around the world,” for the cause of “equal access and a level playing field”.

“We want them to stop stealing our technology, and we’re moving to defend ourselves there,” he wrote in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “We want them to stop forcing the transfer of technology into the joint ventures in China. We want them to comply with the WTO, stop the cyberwar and give us equal access”.

At his confirmation hearing in April, Perdue said that the United States must take a “nuanced, non-partisan, and strategic” view towards China, according to reporting in SCMP. In a September article for the Washington Examiner, however, Perdue accused China of waging “a new kind of war”—one that was “existential,” for the US, and that Beijing was doing so “more aggressively”.

Trump, in his announcement of the appointment, highlighted other qualities.

“He has lived in Singapore and Hong Kong, and worked in Asia and China for much of his career,” the President wrote on Truth Social. “He will be instrumental in implementing my strategy to maintain peace in the region, and a productive working relationship with China’s leaders”.

These views were expressed long before the implementation of unprecedented tariffs of 145% or more on China.

The Grandview Institution, a Beijing geopolitics-focused think tank, claimed that as a member of the Senate Committee on Armed Forces’ sea power subcommittee, Perdue practiced “China threat” theory and stood as a “a prominent hawkish representative” on defense and diplomatic issues towards the Middle Kingdom.

“If the ambassador is not appointed, there will definitely be some confusion and problems in communication and exchanges on the front line,” Sun Chenghao, a fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy, told SCMP.

President Trump said that there was a “very good chance” of reaching a China-US trade deal to cool off the white-hot trade war, despite Trump’s trade envoy Jamieson Greer saying there had been no contact with Beijing. The comments were made shortly after the Dept. of Commerce announced that the US economy shark 0.3%, its first official contraction in several years.

On Monday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said “there have not been any calls between the two presidents recently”. WaL