Trump picks former Georgia Sen. David Perdue for U.S. ambassador to China

HONG KONG — President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday that former Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., had agreed to be nominated to be the next U.S. ambassador to China.

“As a Fortune 500 CEO, who had a 40-year International business career, and served in the U.S. Senate, David brings valuable expertise to help build our relationship with China,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform, noting that Perdue has lived in Singapore and Hong Kong and spent much of his career working in China and elsewhere in Asia.

“He will be instrumental in implementing my strategy to maintain Peace in the region, and a productive working relationship with China’s leaders,” Trump said.

Perdue's nomination is subject to Senate confirmation.

The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and China, the world’s two largest economies, is often described as the most important in the world. Ties reached their lowest point in decades in recent years, but both President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping have been taking steps to improve them despite continuing disputes over trade, technology, human rights and the status of Beijing-claimed Taiwan.

Trump, who takes office in January, started a trade war with China during his first term as president and has vowed to impose tariffs of 60% or more on all Chinese goods imported in his next one. Last week, he said he would impose an additional 10% tariff on Chinese goods unless Beijing does more to stop the international flow of precursor chemicals for fentanyl.

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Perdue, who visited China as part of a congressional delegation in 2018, said in a Fox News commentary written with other senators after the trip that the U.S. needs to “wake up and do a better job competing with China.”

“America’s outdated view of China could result in lost opportunities, or even worse, dangerous miscalculations or complacency,” the senators wrote.

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“We must have a long-term plan to compete and deal with China’s rising economic and geopolitical influence.”

Perdue, 74, a former management consultant, was a Republican senator from Georgia from 2015 to 2021. He served on the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees.

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He lost to Democrat Jon Ossoff in a runoff after the 2020 general election.

In 2022, he ran for governor after Trump recruited him to challenge Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who refused to help Trump overturn Georgia’s election results in 2020, when the state voted for Biden. Perdue lost to Kemp in the Republican primary by more than 50 percentage points.

“David has been a loyal supporter and friend, and I look forward to working with him in his new role!” Trump said Thursday.

Before he entered the Senate, Perdue had a long corporate career, including as president and CEO of Reebok and CEO of Dollar General and the North Carolina textile company PillowTex.

The current U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, told NBC News in October that U.S.-China competition would continue “into the next decade.”

“It’s a very challenging relationship,” he said. “But it’s without any question the most consequential relationship that we Americans have with any other country.”

Xi told Biden last month that he would work with the Trump administration and that “China’s goal of a stable, healthy and sustainable China-U.S. relationship remains unchanged.”