Under Biden, America’s China policy will be tough without being recklessly provocative
Relations will remain difficult, given widespread US antagonism towards China
But the relationship will be better managed – Biden will be more open to areas of cooperation, such as on climate change, and less inclined to use America’s China policy as a prop to further a domestic agenda
The American voter fired Donald Trump on November 3. Come January 20, 2021, shortly after noon, America will have a new president and its first female vice-president, Kamala Harris.
As much as one might hope that this development would usher in efforts by both Beijing and Washington to improve bilateral ties, this is unlikely for two reasons. One is that the post-election political and economic conditions in America are unlikely to be hospitable to such moves.
The other reason is that China’s recently concluded fifth plenary session of the Central Committee in Beijing signalled one thing clearly – Beijing does not intend to alter course either domestically or in terms of foreign policy in ways that would energise Washington to reciprocate.
Focusing on the United States, Joe Biden received more popular votes than any other presidential candidate in American history, as Donald Trump received the second most popular votes in history and more votes than he did in his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton. In short, Trump will be gone from the White House, but Trumpism is not a spent political force.
The stark reality is that public opinion pollsters have consistently underestimated the depth of the cultural, urban-rural divide in America, and the deeply embedded distrust of experts, globalisation, big-city and suburban cosmopolitan values, and everything associated with “socialism”.
This tendency to underestimate the force of Trumpism is seen in the degree to which opinion polls anticipated a Biden win that would be bigger, broader and deeper than the actual impressive victory. Democratic Party leaders had expected a party leadership shift in the US Senate, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats expressed optimism that they would add a number of seats to their current majority in the House of Representatives.
Performance of the Republicans in the Senate exceeded expectations and could very well maintain their narrow majority there while Democrats lost seats in the House. Divided government will almost certainly continue to be a critical feature of the US political landscape.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader from Kentucky, whom many expected to be in a bare-knuckle fight for his political survival and who has been the bane of Democrats, won comfortably and senators most closely associated with Trump and McConnell generally won re-election by wide margins.
The Republican Party has to be pleased with winning eight of 11 governorships, holding onto a disproportionate number of state legislatures and thus far gaining about five seats in the US House of Representatives.
Consequently, friction and gridlock between the executive and legislative branches is likely to continue, with Senate Republicans continuing to exert considerable influence over personnel appointments, international agreements and budgetary matters.
01:46
'The honour of a lifetime': US Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell on his re-election victory
'The honour of a lifetime': US Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell on his re-election victory
This gridlock could be loosened by the fact that President-elect Biden was himself an effective legislator for several decades and has been able to work with Senator McConnell. Biden, by nature and experience, should be more able than Trump to find areas of consensus with Congress. The issue of consensus, however, brings us to America’s China policy.
Unfortunately, one of the few areas where there is a bipartisan consensus of sorts concerns China. There is a widely shared popular and elite view that China is a security threat, a serious economic and technological competitor, an ideological challenger, and that Beijing quite simply does not treat others fairly or in a reciprocal manner.
Public opinion polls document a dramatic rise in the percentage of US citizens holding these perceptions and there is a notable convergence among Democrats and Republicans on these points, according to recentpolls by the Pew Research Centre.
Moreover, these sentiments are shared by America’s historical allies. The Democratic Party and Biden have argued that the Trump administration failed to adequately unite with allies and friends to apply more pressure to Beijing. Biden will wish to use multilateralism to deal with China more effectively.
A final consideration is that the Obama-Biden administration (in 2011) was the architect of the “pivot towards Asia”, the first clear strategic US pushback against China’s foreign policy assertiveness – a move well antedating the Trump administration.
While Biden’s personnel appointments will be announced in the transition weeks ahead, it is likely that there will be considerable overlap with former Obama-Biden foreign policy and national security officials. The intervening years of President Xi Jinping’s domestic and foreign policies have not softened their assessments of Beijing.
Though America’s views of China mentioned above are unlikely to change under Biden, some important things will, which will augur well for better management of US-China relations.
Biden has made effectively addressing America’s internal problems (Covid-19, the economy, racial justice, restoring a fact-based policy process, and domestic civility) his principal priorities. He is not inclined to use China policy as a mere prop in domestic political struggles and he is not looking for Chinese dragons to slay, given his domestic agenda. He will be inclined to be tough without being gratuitously provocative.
A second important difference is that Biden and the personnel he is likely to appoint attach importance to cooperating with Beijing on transnational issues such as climate change, global health and international economic management. Trump and his acolytes had no use for this agenda, dismantling internal and international structures that would promote such concerns.
And finally, one of the principal casualties of the Trump era was a regularised, professional and data-based policy process. Indeed, Trump never even seemed committed to staffing his administration with senior officials and personnel turnover was legion.
Gone is the era when citizens and responsible officials wake up to ill-considered presidential fiats blasted out over Twitter. All this will not guarantee that policy will always be right, but it will be responsibly considered.
The next two months of transition between the Trump and Biden eras will provide progressively more detail to the outline provided here. But something should be said to Beijing. Now is the time to consider whether China wants to open a new, more positive chapter in US-China relations.
David M. Lampton is senior fellow at Johns Hopkins-SAIS’ Foreign Policy Institute and former president of the National Committee on US-China Relations and former chairman of the Asia Foundation. His latest book, with Selina Ho and Cheng-Chwee Kuik, is: Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia. The author wishes to thank Zoe Balk for her research assistance
