Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Nov. 3 result unlikely to change much on China
Both parties, citizenry view Beijing negatively
BEIJING — Chinese leaders hope Washington will tone down conflicts over trade, technology and security if Joe Biden wins the Nov. 3 presidential election.
But any shift is likely to be in style, not substance, as frustration with Beijing increases across the American political spectrum.
Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers and their constituents seem disinclined to adopt a softer approach toward China, possibly presaging more strife ahead, regardless of the election’s outcome.
U.S.-Chinese relations have plunged to their lowest level in decades amid an array of conflicts over the coronavirus pandemic, technology, trade, security and spying.
Despite discord on so many other fronts, both parties are critical of Beijing’s trade record and stance toward Hong Kong, Taiwan and religious and ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang, where the ruling Communist Party has detained Muslims in political re-education camps.
The American public is equally negative. Two-thirds of people surveyed in March by the Pew Research Center had “unfavorable views” of China, the highest since Pew started asking in 2005.
Biden “would be savaged” if he
tried to downplay complaints against Beijing, said Derek Scissors of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.
Chinese leaders have been quieter about this election than during the 2016 presidential race, when they favored Trump over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. They despised Clinton for carrying out then-President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, which included pressuring Beijing on human rights.
But a Biden presidency might re
store a more predictable relationship after the shocks of Trump’s tariff war and his outreach to India, seen as a strategic rival, and Southeast Asian countries, with which Beijing has a series of territorial disputes, Chinese analysts say.
U.S. intelligence officials believe that Chinese leaders don’t want Trump re-elected, according to a statement by William Evanina, the top counterintelligence official. It didn’t directly accuse China of trying to interfere in the election or to support
Biden.
Trump shook up China’s leaders by hiking tariffs on Chinese exports in 2018 over complaints that Beijing steals or pressures companies to hand over technology.
U.S. companies and trading partners have criticized Trump’s tariff war, which prompted Chinese retaliation that hurt American farmers and factory workers. But complaints that China steals technology and violates its market-opening commitments are widely shared.
Tariff hikes on Chinese goods “would probably be removed only gradually under Biden,” Michael Hirson of Eurasia Group, a research firm, said in a report.
Trump’s tariffs were imposed to encourage manufacturers to shift jobs back to the United States, a cause long championed by Democrats.
Other governments uneasy over China’s strategic ambitions also are putting curbs on its tech companies on security grounds.
This week, Swedish regulators banned phone carriers from using equipment from Huawei and its smaller Chinese rival ZTE to build high-speed wireless networks after a security official called China one of the country’s biggest threats.
Biden would try to resume cooperation with Beijing on climate change, North Korea, Iran and the coronavirus, Hirson wrote. But he said Biden would face “widespread U.S. consensus that the pre-Trump approach of engaging China either failed or is no longer suitable.”