A U.S. Policy of Regime Change in China Will Backfire
Two weeks ago, U.S. President Joe Biden met with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, for the last time before he leaves office on the sidelines of the APEC Summit held in Lima, Peru. At the meeting, Xi offered up four red lines in U.S.-China relations that Beijing insists must not be challenged. Some of them, such as China’s perennial concern over Taiwan, are familiar. But others are less so, and they are significant, because they express much greater concern for defending China’s domestic sovereign interests, including its right to economic development, but also its own vision of democracy, human rights and its political system.
Though delivered to the outgoing Biden administration, Xi’s warning was really addressed to the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump and the U.S. more generally. Most importantly, it covers a comprehensive range of concerns: not just over territory and sovereignty, but also regarding the threat of U.S. economic sanctions and export controls that might limit China’s development, as well as other actions that might undermine domestic political stability under Communist Party rule.
Xi’s remarks set the stage for renewed contention and conflict with the Trump administration as the incoming president’s team working on China policy comes into shape. So far major appointments include Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state-nominee, Rep. Mike Waltz as national security adviser and Alex Wong as his principal deputy national security adviser. These picks indicate continuity between the two Trump administrations and a continued emphasis on ideological differences between the U.S. and China. For all the talk about Trump’s proclivity for a transactional approach to foreign policy, he seems intent on appointing people with strong ideological views who are not easy to bargain with.
As in his first term, Trump’s team is likely to emphasize how China’s authoritarian political system undermines the U.S. and the liberal international order, with the goal of U.S. policy being to change China. In 2020, at the tail end of Trump’s first term, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo clearly articulated this emphasis on regime differences and the need for domestic political transformation in China in a speech at the Nixon Presidential Library. More recently, in an April 2024 essay, Matt Pottinger—who served as Trump’s national security adviser for China until Jan. 6, 2021—and former Rep. Mike Gallagher, who chaired the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, stated plainly, “The United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it.” The two defined winning as a change in China’s leaders resulting in more social and political openness. Finally, writing for the Hudson Institute in October 2023, Wong—the incoming deputy national security adviser—argued that domestic political transformation in China will be necessary to end Beijing’s abuse of the liberal international order. As he noted, this goal goes much further than the Cold War-era containment policy adopted by the U.S. toward the Soviet Union and as such will be far more difficult to realize.
To be clear, this focus on regime differences between the U.S. and China is not only a Republican Party talking point. Biden also made what he called the global battle between democracy and autocracy a central narrative of his early presidency, pointing to the threats emanating from China’s authoritarianism as a reason to shore up democracy worldwide. However, the Biden administration did not openly call for the transformation of China’s political system and instead adopted a strategy of “managed competition.” Wong rejects that approach, arguing that in defending its own interests and those of the liberal international order, the U.S. will inevitably threaten the Chinese Communist Party’s domestic legitimacy.
Making political transformation and regime change in Beijing a major U.S. foreign policy goal is likely to undermine Washington’s long-term desire to see China move toward democracy.
It is perfectly valid for Wong and other policymakers to express Washington’s long-term desire to see China move toward democracy and freedom of speech and religion. However, making political transformation and regime change in Beijing a major U.S. foreign policy goal is likely to backfire and undermine those goals. There are two main reasons to not say the quiet part out loud. First, it needlessly antagonizes a regime that is already insecure. Second, U.S. support for domestic political and social change in China taints the actors pushing for those very changes within China, opening them up to accusations of being insufficiently patriotic at best and pawns of “foreign hostile forces” at worst.
In short, this approach increases the regime’s paranoia around domestic political reform while undermining the legitimacy of those who advocate for domestic political reform in China. It’s a lose-lose formula for China hawks in Washington and liberals in China.
The U.S. could still advocate for democracy by decentering its focus on China’s domestic political situation, which the U.S. will have great difficulty in affecting in any case. China’s civil society is weakened and much better monitored now than it was a decade ago, when people-to-people diplomacy, educational exchange and civil society engagement between the two countries were at an all-time high. Instead of trying to change China from the outside, the U.S. and other Western democracies should focus collectively on the negative effects of Chinese mercantilism and overcapacity on their own internal politics.
The first China Shock, referring to the rise in import competition after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, is associated with rising political polarization in regions negatively affected by the resulting shifts in trade flows. In the European Union, rising import competition with China in key sectors such as automotives is now also leading to widespread popular dissatisfaction with mainstream political parties. And the political beneficiaries of the emerging second China Shock from Beijing’s dominance in cutting-edge green technologies have so far been the far left and the far right.
In the end, the policies needed to make democracies more resilient are the same ones put in place by Trump during his first term and bolstered by Biden over the past four years. These use high tariffs on key sectors to protect Western workers from further dislocation and disenchantment, while pressuring China not to export its domestic economic malaise through excessive production and dumping.
In the face of these policies, Xi may be forced to do more to stimulate domestic demand and improve the social welfare and security of China’s aging population. A more secure and prosperous Chinese middle class may indeed demand greater rights and participation, but it would do so not because the U.S. government demanded it, but of its own impetus and needs.
Mary Gallagher is the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.