Gordon Chang: We Need Reagan-Style Effort from Trump on Hong Kong

President Donald Trump should draw from Ronald Reagan’s approach to the Soviet Union and broader communism in delivering a “resolute statement” with “moral clarity” on the matter of ongoing demonstrations in Hong Kong, assessed Gordon Chang, Daily Beast columnist and expert on China.

“Beijing is attacking our democracy,” Chang said in a Monday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow. “It’s attacking the whole notion of representative governance, and it’s trying to encroach on the autonomy of Hong Kong, therefore we’ve got a common foe with the kids on the streets and the middle class people in the streets on Hong Kong, which also means that they need us, but we need them, as well, because they’re the front line of freedom.”

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Chang added, “What we need to hear from President Trump is a resolute statement, one which shows moral clarity. We need to have Ronald Reagan back in the White House. President Trump can be Reagan, but sometimes President Trump isn’t, and on Hong Kong, he has decidedly not been Reagan.”

“We’re still not where we need to be,” Chang estimated.

“President Trump has shown, especially recently, that he does have the will to prosecute this trade war, which is good news, because this is, in many ways, the struggle for the 21st century,” Chang stated. “China’s been stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of intellectual property each year. People say $600 billion, [it] could be as low as $150 billion, but even if it’s at the low end, this is of course a grievous wound for the U.S. and its innovation-based economy.”

Chang continued, “We’ve got to do something. People may not like tariffs, but then the issue is, anything else you’d do to prosecute this trade war would even be more coercive than tariffs.”

“Like in the 1980s and before, we are in an existential struggle,” arraigned Chang, “This time, however, we’ve got a more capable foe, one which is stronger from an economic point of view, also stronger from many other perspectives, so we’ve got to understand that if we want to have a sovereign nation, if we want to be Americans, we have got to make sure that we defend our society, because the Chinese, overall — and this underlies everything else — the Chinese believe that they are the world’s only sovereign state.”

“We need to defend our sovereignty,” concluded Chang.

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