Georgia’s David Perdue Outlines Views on China Challenge in Ambassadorial Hearing

Reciprocity in trade is just the starting point in rebalancing U.S. ties with China, Georgia’s former U.S. Sen. David Perdue said in a nomination hearing to become President Trump’s ambassador to the country. 

Leaning into what he described as a bipartisan consensus on countering China’s sweeping global ambitions, the Fortune 500 CEO turned Trump-backing senator told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he once sat, that the U.S. should take stock of how “Marxist nationalism” is starting to “threaten the current world order.” 

“Put simply, they want a world more in line with their authoritarian principles,” Mr. Perdue said of China in his opening remarks, outlining initiatives like the Belt and Road and Made in China 2025, which he said are proof China is intent on remaking the world in its image. 

“Complicating the current situation, unfettered globalization with minimal national security constraints has led to the situation today where many of America’s key strategic supply chains are in the hands of our adversaries,” he said. 

Describing a “bifurcation” taking place along the lines of democracies versus autocracies around the world, Mr. Perdue said the U.S. for the past three decades has ceded its competitive advantage in strategic industries to China, giving up technology in exchange for the “false hope” of market access. 

Left unsaid was Mr. Perdue’s participation in that process during his career as an executive, which included stints in Hong Kong and Singapore. 

He started work as a consultant for a textile industry looking to diversify sourcing around the world. He then eventually ascended to top executive roles at Dollar General, Sara Lee and Reebok, helping U.S. firms outsource production to China and other locales. 

The committee largely left unchallenged the senator’s outsourcing record and past questioning of Mr. Trump’s tariff policy, prompting Politico to declare he received “kid-glove treatment” in the hearing. 

Mr. Perdue instead harped on China’s cyber attacks, saying he would focus on educating Americans that Chinese hackers are increasingly capable of paralyzing U.S. infrastructure.

“We have got to get China out of our power grid, our ports and our personal lives,” he said, describing China as a master of oblique attacks. “They will never attack you frontally … This goes back to Sun Tzu and Confucius.”

He also lamented overseas China’s military buildup, the Chinese Communist Party’s influence operations in universities and in the media, as well as the country’s efforts to bend multilateral institutions toward its agenda.

Mr. Trump, he said, has started to rectify that by focusing on trade imbalances, describing this as a more collaborative process than it may seem to many partners, especially in Asia and Europe, which were placed in the same camp as China when smacked with so-called reciprocal tariffs this week. Vietnam, where many American companies set up shop to diversify away from China, was hit with a 46 percent levy. 

Mr. Perdue, speaking a day before an across-the-board 10 percent tariff was set to go into effect, insisted Mr. Trump’s “America First” policies are “not isolationist.” 

“Just the reverse: America will be a stronger ally and partner by rebuilding our strategic supply chains at home and with our friends. It is not inconsistent that while we are negotiating for fair trade, we are also seeking to strengthen our ties with our allies,” he said, citing the importance of multilateral partners like the QUAD, AUKUS, ASEAN and NATO.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the ranking member on the committee, pointed out that Mr. Trump has crippled the U.S. apparatus used to project influence and counter China’s growing ambitions, dismantling USAID and cutting funding for U.S.-backed news outlets.

“China is replacing canceled American child nutrition programs in Cambodia, China’s rescue workers are responding to the earthquake in Myanmar before the United States and Chinese disinformation is going to fill the vacuum that has been left by efforts to eliminate Radio Free Asia and Voice of America,” Ms. Shaheen said.  

In an exchange on the topic, Mr. Perdue noted that he supports U.S. engagement in the world but asserted that USAID and other aid programs are funded by U.S. borrowing, and that Mr. Trump is focusing on fiscal responsibility while ensuring that such spending furthers U.S. foreign policy goals.

Working with allies, Mr. Perdue said, the U.S. should change the economic calculus with China while pushing back on human rights violations and propaganda efforts and curbing the production of fentanyl precursors. 

“We’ve got to rebuild our strategic supply chains, rare earth elements, steel, shipbuilding, pharmaceuticals, chips, quantum computing, all of these. We’ve acquiesced through this globalization in the last two decades to basically China and people who would do us harm. The reciprocal nature that we want with China — I think President Trump is all over that. The starting conversation with trade — there are going to be many others.” 

He noted that companies are beginning to “sober up,” realizing that the “price has been too high” for Chinese market access, he said in response to questions from the panel.

“The technology that’s been forced to transfer through corporate deals made in China, I think a lot of those people, in my experience, have now come back to rue the day that they ever did that.”

• Watch the hearing here 
• Read Mr. Perdue’s September 2024 essay in the Washington Times about the “new kind of war” the U.S. faces with China: China’s new war: America’s freedom depends on confronting the threat

See Mr. Perdue’s prepared introductory remarks at the hearing below: 

040325_Perdue_Testimony