Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed in an op-ed for the New York Times: “China’s Rise Isn’t Our Demise.”

Now, with nearly 23,000 Americans dead following the attempted Chinese Communist Party cover-up of the coronavirus, it’s time to look back at the would-be president’s claim.

In the 2011 op-ed, Biden wrote: “I remain convinced that a successful China can make our country more prosperous, not less,” and concluded, “Some may warn of America’s demise, but I’m not among them. And let me reassure you: based on my time in China, neither are the Chinese.”

Over the decade prior to that claim – 2001 to 2011 – the United States lost 2.7 million jobs to China, partly because of Chinese currency manipulation.

Courted by cheap labor and low production costs, U.S. CEOs – like heads of the auto industry – increasingly moved their manufacturing companies overseas. By 2010, China passed the United States as the world’s top car market.

The gradual dominance of American industry also benefitted from routine intellectual property theft.

In 2019, one in five U.S. corporations reported that China’s companies had stolen their intellectual property within the last year.

This year, the FBI finally named China as “the biggest law enforcement threat to the United States.”

According to bureau director Christopher Wray, “The FBI has about 1,000 investigations involving China’s attempted theft of US-based technology in all 56 of our field offices and spanning just about every industry sector.”

William Evanina, director of the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center, believes that Chinese theft as it pertains to American trade secrets cost the United States “anywhere from $300bn to $600bn” every year.

While American workers saw their wages plummet and their jobs shipped overseas to China, Wall Street corporatists prospered.

Take the former Vice President’s son, Hunter Biden. Hunter is one of nine directors at BHR partners, a firm controlled by Chinese government-owned entities.

According to reports, “over the past roughly six years, [BHR Partners] has channeled $2.5 billion or more on behalf of its financial backers into automotive, energy, mining and technology deals.” In 2015, BHR joined a $600 million takeover of Henniges Automotive, a Michigan-based automotive industry company, and secured a 49 percent stake as a result of the deal.

Despite the Chinese blow to American industry at the expense of working-class people, Vice President Joe Biden continued to applaud government-led Chinese manufacturing.

At the Export Import Bank conference in Washington in April of 2013, Biden said: “We have to update the global rules of the road. We have to do it in a way that maximize benefits for everyone, because obviously, it’s overwhelmingly in our interest, this is not a zero-sum game, it’s overwhelmingly in our interest that China prosper.”

U.S. Attorney General William Barr disagrees.

In his keynote address at the Department of Justice’s China Initiative Conference in 2018, Barr said: “For China, success is a zero-sum game.”

He then announced the Justice Department’s China Initiative, “to confront China’s malign behaviors and protect U.S. technology.”

According to Barr, the People’s Republic of China “employs a multi-pronged approach: engaging in cyber intrusions, co-opting private sector insiders through its intelligence services, and using non-traditional collectors, such as graduate students participating in university research projects.”

The same year Vice President Joe Biden penned his “China’s Rise Isn’t Our Demise” opinion piece for the NYT, Donald Trump – a private citizen at the time – tweeted: “Why do we continue to sit idly by while China steals our national security and corporate secrets? China is an enemy, not a friend.”

The novel coronavirus has made it clear that Biden’s history of praise for Chinese Communist Party certainly does not stand the test of time.