Over the past few weeks, the upheavals in the U.S. presidential election season have drawn enormous global attention. Even before the summer began, countries were weighing the implications of former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House and, conversely, what a second term for U.S. President Joe Biden might bring. To many countries, these two possibilities presented markedly different prospects for geopolitics and for the future role of the United States in world affairs.
Then came nine remarkable days in July, during which Trump was almost assassinated and Biden abruptly announced that he would not seek reelection. Upending the U.S. presidential race for both parties, these events have created further uncertainty about the coming direction of the United States. Many countries see an increasingly stark divergence between the anticipated continuation of Biden’s internationalist foreign policy under a future President Kamala Harris and a far more isolationist approach under a reelected President Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance.
From China, however, the view is somewhat different. Eight years ago, the first Trump administration ushered in a far more confrontational approach to relations with Beijing, which many Chinese observers found bewildering. Rather than treating China as a trading partner and sometimes a rival, the United States began to call it a “revisionist power,” a strategic competitor, and even a threat. More striking still, despite changes in tone, the Biden administration, has reinforced that shift and even taken it further on some issues. Indeed, there seems to be a bipartisan consensus in Washington that China must now be treated as a major adversary, with a growing contingent of analysts arguing for a cold war framing.
To Chinese observers, rather than offering alternative approaches to their country and the world, the two major U.S. parties both reflect a general approach to China that has emerged in recent years, one that is strongly informed by domestic U.S. political concerns. What is more important than either party’s views are the several gradations of U.S. analysis of China and what they could mean in practice. Most Chinese observers do not expect significant changes in U.S. policy toward China. But they are trying to understand which strands of current thinking in Washington may ultimately dominate.
PLAYING TO THE HOME CROWD
Owing to China’s political structure and the close government management of Chinese public opinion, it is difficult to fathom how the leadership in Beijing views and reacts to U.S. debate about China. Nevertheless, some general points can be made about the forces that many in China see as driving that debate. First, a country’s external actions tend to reflect its domestic politics. This phenomenon appears to be especially true in the United States, in which major domestic debates can easily spill over into foreign affairs. And it has come to play a particular role in how Washington approaches China.
Thus, both Trump’s “America first” mantra and Biden’s “foreign policy for the middle class” catchphrase vividly demonstrate the close relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy in the United States. After Trump took office, the deeply polarized political climate in the United States shaped his foreign policy, particularly toward China. The “America first” approach was largely a response to American voters’ concerns about globalization and immigration. As a result, the Trump administration raised trade barriers, restricted immigration, and limited U.S. participation in international organizations, prioritizing the United States’ economic interests and national security.
Biden’s foreign policy shares similar political considerations with Trump’s.
Yet the Biden administration has also made clear that its foreign policy decisions are aimed to align with the interests of voters at home and that the prosperity of ordinary Americans also has an international dimension. Thus, Biden’s foreign policy shares similar political considerations with Trump’s, as it aims to rebalance domestic industrial policies and international economic rules to promote domestic interests. Some U.S. issues themselves have both domestic and foreign components. A continuous influx of immigrants is not only a driving force behind the prosperity of the United States but also affects its border security and its relations with the outside world. Since the Trump administration, the fentanyl crisis in the United States has required cooperation with China, and China has responded positively. Nevertheless, members of Congress continue to blame China for the fentanyl entering the United States from Mexico.
A second feature of U.S. foreign policy in recent years is the growing role that China plays in it. Although Russia’s armed conflict with Ukraine and Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza draw much attention, China continues to be the top priority in Washington’s pronounced global strategy. At this critical juncture, many U.S. strategists are renewing calls for Washington to accelerate its pivot to Asia. For example, in their new book, Lost Decade, the foreign policy analysts Robert Blackwill and Richard Fontaine contend that the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have all, in various ways, fallen short in developing strong and coherent policies toward China and the rest of Asia. Despite the continuing challenges for the United States in Europe and the Middle East, they argue, it is crucial for U.S. policymakers to hasten the shift toward Asia.
The importance of China policy has already become clear in the U.S. presidential contest. Both parties are vying to produce the strongest rhetoric about getting tough on Beijing and restricting its global role. And this points to yet another feature of the American debate about China: in the current U.S. political context, the traditional binary of “doves” and “hawks” cannot capture the complexities of U.S. perceptions of China. Given the broad bipartisan consensus that China poses a major challenge, it is more meaningful to examine the range of policy perspectives that has emerged within this general view.
A THREE-SIDED DEBATE
Observed from afar, U.S. strategists on China can be broadly divided into three schools. The first might be called the New Cold Warriors. People in this group believe that the U.S.-Chinese rivalry is a zero-sum game and that Washington and Beijing are engaged in a cold war that requires even more aggressive tactics from the United States. As former U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger and former U.S. Congressman Mike Gallagher argued in Foreign Affairs, the competition with China “must be won, not managed.” In making this argument, they and others have drawn on U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s example of setting the Soviet threat as a top priority, in order to pursue victory in the Cold War.
The second school could be described as the Competition Managers. Contrary to the New Cold Warriors, those in this camp hold the idea that the U.S.-Chinese rivalry is not a zero-sum game and, consequently, that it is essential to have a strategy for coexisting with China. The intellectual origins of this approach can be traced to an article that Kurt Campbell and Jake Sullivan wrote for Foreign Affairs in 2019, before they both joined the Biden administration. As they argued, the contest with China is “a condition to be managed rather than a problem to be solved.” Along with Rush Doshi, who was deputy senior director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council from 2021 to early 2024, and others, they suggest that Washington’s best approach to China is leading with competition, followed by offers of cooperation.
The third might be called the Accommodationists. Although they share the other schools’ dislike for China’s political system and its global influence, they tend to be more concerned than their counterparts that competition could devolve into confrontation. As prominent figures in this camp, the international relations scholars Jessica Chen Weiss and James Steinberg are against waging a cold war with China because cold wars are inherently dangerous. In their view, Pottinger and Gallagher offer an illusory appeal to victory, because “U.S. efforts to bring about change through pressure are as likely to consolidate authoritarian rule as to undermine it.” Weiss and Steinberg argue that it is therefore in the interest of both Beijing and Washington to reduce the risk of war and to cooperate on issues of mutual concern, such as climate change and public health.
Despite this diversity of opinion, all three schools agree that China poses a significant challenge to the United States. They also concur that U.S. policy toward China needs bipartisan foundations to succeed. Nonetheless, there appears to be no prevailing view in Washington on which approach is best or on what aspect of the challenge—political, military, economic, or global governance—is most serious. For Beijing, this unsettled debate has meant that it is crucial to understand how these different approaches are influencing U.S. policies and, specifically, how they might shape the incoming U.S. administration.
DIFFERENT TACTICS, SAME AIMS
Americans may be tempted to ask whether China prefers a Harris administration or a second Trump administration—or more broadly, whether it prefers Democrats or Republicans. After all, in 1972, Chairman Mao Zedong told President Richard Nixon that he liked the political right in the United States and other Western countries. Although Mao did not give a reason for this preference, it seems likely that he saw Nixon and other right-leaning Western leaders as paying more attention to the economic and security interests of their countries, whereas politicians on the left tended to base their policies on ideology and political values.
Yet it is difficult to judge whether the Democrats or the Republicans have made a greater contribution to U.S.-Chinese relations. For instance, although Nixon, a Republican, first broke the ice with China, it was President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, who decided to establish diplomatic ties with Beijing. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, there have been seven Democratic presidents and seven Republican presidents in the United States, and major breakthroughs and crises in bilateral ties have occurred under both.
The same uncertainty holds true with Chinese assessments of the two parties today. When Trump took office, in 2017, his foremost concern about China was the enormous U.S. trade deficit, and for the first time in U.S. history, the deficit, as well as China’s technological edge, was treated as a national security issue. Not only did the Trump administration label China a “revisionist power” and a strategic competitor; it also identified the Chinese Communist Party as a threat to the American way of life and “the free world.” Launching an aggressive yet inconsistent “whole of government” approach, the Trump administration set out to compete with and confront China on almost every issue.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Osaka, Japan, June 2019
Kevin Lamarque / Reuters Starting with trade, the Trump administration began with punitive tariffs on Chinese imports and then expanded its campaign to include increased scrutiny and restrictions on Chinese investments, tightened high-technology export controls, and targeted actions against specific Chinese companies with large overseas presences, such as Huawei. On security issues, the Trump administration also took new steps to maintain U.S. supremacy in what strategists now consistently called the “Indo-Pacific” region, a geographical term that had been used only occasionally earlier. The Trump administration gave Taiwan special security assurances and downplayed the long-standing “one China” policy; put new resources into the Quad (the grouping of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) in an effort to collectively balance China; and stepped up U.S. military activities in the Western Pacific to challenge China’s territorial claims.
As for the political relationship between the United States and China, Trump did not hold rigidly ideological views on the Chinese system and leadership, but he allowed his administration officials and the U.S. Congress to stridently criticize China’s ruling party and its domestic governance, particularly its policies toward Xinjiang and Hong Kong. And as his administration adopted a broader “China threat” narrative, it severely damaged the academic, scientific, and societal exchanges between the two countries that had existed for decades. In multilateral diplomacy, Washington also began to demonize Beijing and strongly counter its international influence, trying to constrain China’s expanding global role in its Belt and Road Initiative and in its growing involvement in United Nations bodies.
Then, in 2020, amid a complicated election year in the United States, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the downward spiral of relations between Washington and Beijing. The Trump administration blamed the public health crisis on the Chinese government, suspended most bilateral dialogues, and adopted a hostile stance toward China itself. In July 2020, the U.S. government even ordered China’s consulate general in Houston to close down, accusing it of being a “hub of spying and intellectual property theft.”
Yet overall, the Trump administration maintained a degree of flexibility toward China. Despite its punitive tariffs and other measures, it remained open to trade talks and demonstrated some willingness to compromise on thorny issues such as technological competition and Taiwan. What’s more, “America first” also meant that Washington held less credibility and leverage in coordinating with other countries on their own policies toward China, with the result that the Trump administration did not build and lead a strong multilateral front to counter China. This encouraged a popular perception among some Chinese commentators that Trump was primarily interested in business benefits and making a deal with China. In November 2017, Trump paid a state visit to Beijing—a step that Biden has failed to take during his administration—and in January 2020 signed a phase one trade agreement with China to begin to resolve trade tensions. By the end of the Trump presidency, many in the United States characterized his administration’s trade war with China as a failure.
Despite its punitive tariffs, the Trump administration remained open to trade talks.
For all its putative differences from the Trump administration, the Biden administration has shown noticeable continuity with its predecessor on China. Mainly, Biden has cemented the generally adversarial orientation of Trump-era policies by way of a more systematic and multilateral approach, which his administration has called “invest, align, and compete.” In his first foreign policy speech, in February 2021, Biden called China the United States’ “most serious competitor” and pledged to “take on directly” the challenges it posed to U.S. “prosperity, security, and democratic values.”
Thus, Biden has worked closely with Congress to implement large-scale infrastructure investments and industrial policies aimed at making the United States more competitive and less reliant on China. To better compete on advanced technologies, the Biden administration has also sought tighter export controls, new tariffs on China’s green technology products, and more coordinated international efforts such as the Chip 4 alliance—a semiconductor partnership between Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the United States.
In the Asia-Pacific, the Biden administration has intensified its military presence in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea and added a regional economic dimension to the United States’ Asian security alliances. Biden has also rallied G-7 leaders to push forward the Build Back Better World initiative and the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment—both aimed at providing a Western answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Prompted by China’s growing ties with Russia amid the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration has imposed sanctions on Chinese companies that trade with Russia. Washington has also given the contest with China a new overlay of ideology—what the administration calls “democracy versus autocracy”—in an effort to build a grand alliance against Beijing.
Although it has competed fiercely with China, the Biden administration has maintained regular high-level communication channels and continued to explore areas of cooperation. Despite its emphasis on what it sees as China’s political influence, the Biden team has taken steps to depoliticize and restore bilateral academic and societal exchanges, such as ending the Trump administration’s China Initiative—a controversial crackdown on researchers in the United States who had contacts with Chinese entities. Biden also had direct meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Bali, Indonesia, in November 2022, and in San Francisco in November 2023, in which the two leaders pledged to maintain a stable and healthy bilateral relationship.
BIG YARDS OR BROAD COALITIONS
Chinese strategists hold few illusions that U.S. policy toward China might change course over the next decade. Given U.S. public opinion polls and the bipartisan consensus about China in Washington, they assume that whoever is elected in November 2024 will continue to prioritize strategic competition and even containment in Washington’s approach to Beijing, with cooperation and exchanges taking a back seat.
A new Trump administration would almost certainly pursue a more aggressive trade policy toward China. Trump has already proposed a 60 percent tariff on all goods manufactured in China, as well as the revocation of China’s permanent normal trade relations status, which has granted nondiscriminatory, favorable trade terms and market access since 2000. He has also called for a “big yard, high fence” doctrine—an explicit expansion of the Biden administration’s “small yard, high fence” concept that only protects critical and emerging technologies with robust security measures—to enable a broader technological decoupling from China.
Still, given Trump’s predilection for dealmaking, he might decide to pursue bilateral agreements with Beijing on consumer goods, energy, and technology. He might also try to use the Taiwan issue as a bargaining chip to gain leverage in other areas, such as offering to restrain Taiwan’s provocative actions in exchange for Beijing’s compromise on trade. But it is highly unlikely that China would agree to such a deal, and Trump’s foreign policy advisers might also oppose it. Once again, with his general preference for bilateral diplomacy over multilateralism, Trump might also be less capable of mobilizing allies and partners against China and might seek a separate U.S. accommodation with Russia, a staunch strategic partner of China.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Bangkok, November 2022
The White House / Reuters For its part, a Harris administration, assuming it retained much of the Biden approach, would likely intensify strategic competition with Beijing and consolidate Biden’s efforts to build a coalition of Western and Asian countries to counterbalance China. Compared with Trump’s arbitrary and fickle policymaking, these strategies would likely remain more organized and predictable.
Yet overall, from a Chinese perspective, the China policies of a new Trump administration and a Harris administration will likely be strategically consistent. As presidents, both candidates would present challenges and disadvantages for China, and neither seems likely to want a major military conflict or to cut off all economic and societal contacts. Therefore, Beijing is unlikely to have a clear preference. Moreover, China has strong incentives to maintain a stable relationship with the United States and to avoid confrontation or major disruptions. Given the political sensitivities regarding the election and U.S.-Chinese relations, any Chinese action to interfere would likely backfire.
As the 2024 U.S. presidential race heats up, officials in Beijing have made cautious and reserved remarks about it, with government officials describing the election as “America’s internal affair.” At a press briefing in July, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lin Jian stressed that China “has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S.” Lin also said, however, that the Chinese government “staunchly rejects anyone making an issue of China and damaging China’s interests for election purposes” and that the two U.S. political parties “should not spread disinformation to vilify China and should not make China an issue.” That signals that Beijing may feel compelled to respond, at least rhetorically, if it is attacked during the campaigns. Despite its declared principle of noninterference, Beijing may not be able to silence sensational, irresponsible, and provocative voices in Chinese-language social media. Some of these are aired outside China and may reflect the specific agendas of particular external Chinese communities and should therefore not be construed as representing China’s official position.
CAUTION, NOT CATASTROPHE
Like Washington, Beijing’s primary concern in 2024 is its domestic situation. In contrast with the political polarization and volatile election season in the United States, China appears to be politically stable and socially cohesive under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. In mid-July, the 20th CCP Central Committee concluded its third plenary session with a positive assessment of China’s economic recovery, despite below-expectation economic growth figures for the first half of 2024, and made a proposal for comprehensively deepening reforms to advance China’s modernization. Seeking to balance economic development and national security, Beijing’s top priority remains institution building, particularly strengthening the CCP leadership and enforcing party discipline.
On the one hand, Beijing recognizes that sustaining economic growth is imperative for domestic stability and takes incremental measures to enhance foreign trade, investment, and technological cooperation. In this regard, it sees no advantage in antagonizing the United States and the West. On the other hand, the Chinese government has spared no effort in guarding against what it sees as Western—and in particular, American—attempts to undermine its authority and legitimacy at home, and it will not sacrifice political principles and national security for economic gains.
Although it seeks stability with Washington, Beijing has also been preparing for growing turbulence in the bilateral relationship. In March 2023, Xi observed, “Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-around containment, encirclement, and suppression against us, bringing unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development.” Two months later, at the first meeting of the new Central National Security Committee, Xi called on the party to “be prepared for worst-case and extreme scenarios and to be ready to withstand the major test of high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms.” In foreign affairs, Beijing still depicts the world as comprising both developing and developed countries rather than framing it as Western and anti-Western blocs competing for influence in the global South.
China has adamantly resisted U.S. interference in what it regards as its domestic affairs, particularly on issues such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and human rights. China regards the Taiwan question, in particular, as holding core importance. Beijing believes it has exercised significant restraint toward Taiwan and is far from exhausting its potential policy options for preventing the island from obtaining de jure independence. Under these circumstances, the Chinese leadership will adhere to its declared principle of peaceful unification with Taiwan and “one country, two systems” unless it is drastically and irreversibly provoked. In its territorial dispute with the Philippines in the South China Sea, China views its approach as calibrated and confident. In its tensions with the United States over trade and technology, China sees itself focusing on measured counteractions and compelled to double down on pursuing self-reliance.
Given the broad similarities of both the Trump and the Biden administrations’ approach to China, Beijing is preparing itself for the outcome of the U.S. elections with great caution and limited hope. In April, Xi restated to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that “China welcomes a confident, open, prosperous, and thriving United States and hopes the United States will also look at China’s development in a positive light.” Unfortunately, the likelihood that the next U.S. administration will view China’s development positively is low. As China continues to prioritize domestic development and security, it will likely strive to defend its economic and governance models while preserving space for global trade and investment. For a long time to come, U.S.-Chinese relations seem unlikely to return to the deep exchanges and cooperation that occurred at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Yet if a rapprochement is out of the question, China and the United States can still maintain stability and avoid catastrophe, whoever is in the Oval Office.