China Daily gave favorable coverage to Jeffrey Sachs’s comments at a recent webinar where he promoted Joe Biden’s approach to China over President Donald Trump’s, describing Sachs as a “renowned expert… an economics professor at Columbia University and a senior United Nations adviser.” However, China Daily and others in China would do well to recall Sachs’s leading role in pushing through genocidal shock therapy in Russia and Poland in the 1990s, and in turning Bolivia into a cocaine economy in the 1980s, and evaluate the intention of his current statements accordingly.
Sachs stated: “I see the current path [regarding China] as being very dangerous, because geopolitics is not a game.... I believe that China’s success is a global success—a great civilization that has escaped from poverty (and) developed advanced technologies is a great benefit for the world, not a curse for the world.”
Sachs warned that the current anti-China rhetoric is “extraordinarily dangerous,” adding that China “should not be treated in this disgraceful way....They didn’t steal everything. They didn’t cheat on everything. They didn’t create all these conflicts. This is just our social media, Trump-world craziness.”
Then came Sachs’s punch line: “If Trump wins (in the November election), I think the world will be profoundly dangerous and unstable. I think the current approach indeed would probably intensify after Trump’s reelection. And I know enough of history to say that it worries me profoundly. But if Biden wins, we’re going to have a period of more protectionism in the United States, that’s for sure. But I think we’ll also have a return to rational ideas and not this kind of quite flagrant, and obnoxious and provocative attack and name-calling.”
