WASHINGTON – President Biden warned Thursday that the United States should “step up” and fix its dilapidated infrastructure or be left behind by an economically growing China that will “eat our lunch.”
“Last night, I was on the phone for two hours straight with Xi Jinping,” Biden told Oval Office reporters after his first call with the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.
Describing the call as “a good conversation,” the president expressed concern about the growing rivalry between Washington and Beijing for world domination and said the United States was lagging behind.
“If we don’t move, they’ll eat our lunch,” Biden said. “They have new and important railroad initiatives and they already have railroads that go easily at 225 mph.”
The changing relationship between the United States and China poses one of the biggest foreign policy challenges for Biden’s presidency and occurs when China tries to grow its influence abroad with its huge “Belt Initiative.” and roads ”providing infrastructure loans to poor nations.
The Trump administration took a hard-line approach from Beijing, hitting Chinese-made goods with high tariffs and promising to return to a period of American prosperity.
Biden spoke about China’s growing economic power during a meeting with Democratic senators on U.S. infrastructure investment and said he had directed them to begin examining how the U.S. could fight.
The president said the US should reflect Beijing’s efforts on new technologies such as electric cars.
“They’re working really hard to do what I think we’re going to have to do,” he said.
“They’re investing billions of dollars to address a whole range of issues related to transportation, the environment and a whole host of other things, so we just need to step up,” he said.
During his first speech at the Pentagon on Wednesday, the president also revealed that a new Department of Defense working group will examine the U.S.-China military stance and its “growing challenges.”
