United States/China

Former US president Donald Trump was characteristically derogatory when discussing how his opponent would reckon with China. In a radio interview last week, Trump scoffed to right-wing commentator Hugh Hewitt that Vice President Kamala Harris would be handled “like a baby” by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“She wouldn’t have any idea what happened,” Trump said. “It would be like a grand chess master playing a beginner.”

The jury’s out on Trump’s own record when he sat in the White House and locked horns with Xi. The heavy-handedness of his agenda sent jitters among America’s Asian allies.

Under his watch, Trump opened up a trade war with China, slapping many billions of dollars of tariffs on Chinese goods. Economists largely view those efforts at pressuring Beijing - including the Trump-Xi trade deal that emerged following rounds of bilateral talks - as a failure. They undermined US productivity, cost the country thousands jobs by some counts, and drove up prices.

Undeterred, Trump has vowed to double down on his approach should he return to power, aiming for a blanket 60% tariff on all Chinese goods, which analysts once again warn will be ruinous to the US and global economy.

President Joe Biden maintained many of those protectionist measures, and accelerated an American turn towards an industrial policy far more ambitious in scope and seriousness than anything Trump mustered in office. Republicans and Democrats are at odds on many fronts, but the relative bipartisan, hawkish consensus on China catalysed by Trump has endured under Biden.

As the United States goes to vote, Chinese analysts are not particularly enthused by either potential outcome.

“From a Chinese perspective, the China policies of a new Trump administration and a Harris administration will likely be strategically consistent,” wrote Wang Jisi, Hu Ran and Zhao Jianwei, international affairs scholars at Beijing’s influential Peking University.

US analysts are not expecting a thaw, either.

“Strategic competition between the United States and China is poised to intensify no matter who assumes the US presidency in January 2025,” said Ali Wyne, an expert on US-China relations at the International Crisis Group.

China’s “military modernisation, the progress that it is making in cultivating its innovation ecosystem, and the traction that it is gaining across the developing world for its critiques of today’s international order” all presented thorny geopolitical challenges for the next US president, Wyne said.

“Xi and the senior Chinese leadership’s view is summarised in Xi Jinping’s aphorism, ‘The rise of the East and the decline of the West’ … and that we are now living in a period of great historical change the likes of which we have ‘not seen in 100 years’,” Kevin Rudd, former Australian prime minister and current ambassador in Washington, told Politico.

“These are not just propagandistic phrases,” Rudd added. “They also reflect the underlying Chinese analysis of where America’s comprehensive national power lies at the present versus where China’s lies. He sees the forces of history moving decisively in China’s direction.”

The relative economic funk that has settled over China suggests that the path of China’s inexorable march isn’t as smoothly paved as Xi may claim.

“China’s growth headwinds and strained relations with advanced industrial democracies mean that it is unlikely to dominate Asia, let alone achieve global preeminence,” Wyne said.

Trump’s constant refrain is that America’s decline is guaranteed should he and his ultranationalist movement not find itself back in power.

Harris, like Biden, presents a more optimistic vision. She is expected to continue the Biden strategy of working to boost the US’s economic competitiveness - especially in high-tech and green tech sectors - while shoring up US partnerships with countries near China that are wary of their neighbour’s growing assertiveness. The tacit support for Taiwan’s defence will continue amid Beijing’s sabre-rattling.

Among the US foreign policy establishment, China elicits a wide range of concerns.

Some fear that the US will have no way in the long run of outperforming China’s state-backed production of cutting-edge semiconductors, critical to advanced manufacturing. Others reckon the US’s defence industrial basis is too depleted and not equipped to keep pace with China’s military expansion and the threats to deterrence it inevitably poses.

And some believe that the volatility of US domestic politics will handicap Washington’s efforts to check China’s own export of its authoritarian values to the developing world.

Some China experts in Trump’s camp pan Biden’s “soft détente” approach, urging a more ideological confrontation.

“If Washington wants to achieve victory without war in competition with a capable, belligerent Leninist regime, history tells us that it should adapt and apply the best lessons of the Cold War,” wrote Matt Pottinger, a former Trump adviser on China, and Mike Gallagher, a former leading China hawk who resigned from the US Congress in April.

In an exchange with Pottinger and Gallagher, Rush Doshi, a former Biden adviser, argued that the two camps could share similar assessments of China’s intent while preparing markedly different strategies.

“Betting on a great power’s collapse or liberalisation is unwise,” Doshi wrote. “Despite its challenges, China is the first US competitor in a century to surpass 60% of US GDP. The country boasts considerably greater industrial and technological strength than the Soviet Union did, and is deeply enmeshed in the global economy. It cannot be wished away.”

Wyne notes that there are more pronounced disagreements within Trump’s circle on China, with some eschewing Republican hawkishness for a more transactional approach that could one day, say, sacrifice commitments to Taiwan or other Asian partners in favour of a grand bargain with Beijing.

“The former president’s ‘America First’ world view would strain core US relationships in Europe and Asia,” Wyne said. “His overriding focus on creating a more balanced economic relationship between the United States and China suggests that he would be willing to make significant concessions.”

Jisi, Ran and Jianwei, the Peking University scholars, argued that Trump may “be less capable of mobilising allies and partners against China, and might seek a separate US accommodation with Russia, a staunch strategic partner of China”.

But Kyung-wha Kang, president of the Asia Society, whose stint as South Korea’s foreign minister overlapped with the Trump administration, expects broader trends to hold.

“The momentum of US allies and partners pulling together is expected to continue,” Kang wrote.

“Under a Harris administration, a more networked set of allies and partners in Asia would serve an important role of balancing China’s rise. Under a Trump administration, they may be more likely to pull together against concerns of long-term US unreliability and inattention.”