Republicans could suffer from Chinese company’s failure to buy Montana beef
Deal touted during Trump’s 2017 Beijing visit may affect tight U.S. Senate race
By David J. Lynch
Oct. 27, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
The deal seemed like great news for Montana ranchers: Chinese retailer JD.com had promised to buy $200 million worth of beef and spend an additional $100 million building a slaughterhouse in the state.
But nearly three years after the accord was announced on the sidelines of President Trump’s first official trip to Beijing, the big orders have yet to materialize and there’s no sign of any new meatpacking plant.
The project’s apparent collapse has surfaced in the state’s U.S. Senate race, one of several contests that could determine whether the Republicans retain control of the chamber or surrender it to the Democrats. The vanishing beef deal shows how the souring of the U.S.-China relationship is reshaping U.S. politics, making a liability of once-beneficial ties and placing a premium on hard-edge rhetoric toward Beijing.
Trump expresses anger that his China deal is off to a rocky start
In Montana, Gov. Steve Bullock, the Democratic challenger, has criticized Republican Sen. Steve Daines, who claimed credit for brokering the beef deal, for being too cozy with the Chinese government. The state Democratic Party has run ads calling Daines “China’s cheerleader” and accused him of helping outsource jobs as a business executive in the 1990s, a charge he denied in earlier campaigns.
“China is not popular,” said David Parker, a political scientist at Montana State University. “Montana’s a state where there’s a fear of the other, a fear of big companies and big government. And China is the new version of that.”
Beijing’s failure to contain the coronavirus — on top of a trade war that punished Montana farmers — has eroded China’s standing and created an opening to attack lawmakers who promoted transpacific ties. In a Pew Research Center survey this month, 73 percent of Americans said they held an unfavorable view of the country.
Daines worked in China for several years in the 1990s as an executive with Procter & Gamble and spent a decade managing Asia-Pacific sales for a software company. To promote U.S. beef as a senator, he carted a cooler full of Montana steaks to Beijing for a 2017 meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and later hosted Chinese Ambassador Cui Tiankai at an agricultural forum in Montana.
“In 2017, Sen. Daines said he secured a 'landmark’ beef deal with China for Montana ranchers. Three years later, there’s little evidence Montana beef was sold to China through that deal,” Bullock tweeted this month. “So after years of broken promises, Montanans want to know: Where’s the beef, @SteveDaines?”
As China has grown more unpopular, Daines has pivoted from casting his overseas business experience as a plus to hammering Beijing for mishandling the coronavirus.
“I’m cracking down on China,” he said in one commercial.
The latest MSU poll effectively shows a dead heat with Daines trailing Bullock 49 percent to 47 percent, well within the margin of error.
Apart from its role in this key Senate race, the Montana beef arrangement also reflects the evolution of U.S.-China ties in the Trump era. JD.com was among nearly three dozen business deals announced by the Commerce Department in November 2017, when Chinese officials still believed they could manage a businessman-president by emphasizing potential profits.
Wrapping up his official debut in the Chinese capital, Trump touted the business ventures — which involved companies such as Boeing, Caterpillar and Dow Chemical — as “tremendous, incredible, job-producing agreements.”
But the reality quickly fell short of the marketing hype — and the U.S. approach to China toughened.
Many of the deals, including JD.com’s, were nonbinding memorandums rather than legally enforceable contracts. Under its agreement, JD.com pledged to import a total of $200 million in Montana beef from companies belonging to the Montana Stockgrowers Association (MSGA) for online sales to Chinese consumers.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/10/27/montana-senate-daines-bullock-beef-china/
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