During the televised debate on September 10, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump did not clash over the attitude to adopt towards China. The decision to block the road to Chinese investments was taken by Donald Trump in 2018; Joe Biden, who became president in 2020, continued this direction. In Beijing, one cannot help but take into account the obvious American reluctance to see China strengthen its economy, in particular through its exports.
In detailing the campaign spots of the two candidates, Chinese media have counted 171 which address the riskfor the United States, of the rise of China. This is not a subject of divergence between the Democrats and the Republicans: on the Chinese question, the American response is so obvious that the remarks of Kamala Harris or Donald Trump on this subject have not been the subject of headlines in the American or international press.
However, in this debate on the ABC television channel, China was repeatedly mentioned. Donald Trump claimed that Beijing was afraid of him, particularly in economic matters. His project as a candidate is for the United States to impose 10% customs duty on imports from all countries of the planet (while the current average is 3.3%) and that Chinese products are taxed at a rate ranging from 60 to 100%.
As for Kamala Harris, she denounced the highest trade deficits in American history that the former Trump administration had allowed to grow with China. She also criticized the former president for having sold American chips to China that help it “improve and modernize its army”The candidate stressed that, on the contrary, the Biden administration had worked to restrict China’s access to American semiconductors.
Times have changed, but not as expected
On August 30, at the Futuroscope in Poitiers, during the Annual Forum of the Prospective and Innovation FoundationAndré Chieng, Chairman and CEO of theAsian European Trade Union (AEC)explained the Chinese point of view by saying: “That China could overtake the United States has always seemed incongruous to Americans convinced of the absolute superiority of their system and their institutions.”
And André Chieng then clarified: “When the Soviet Union came close to overtaking the United States militarily, they shot it down; when Japan came close to overtaking them economically, they clipped its wings. (…) And now the only country that has any chance of overtaking the United States is China. They can’t stand the thought of being replaced by any other country, friendly or not. That’s what has gradually made the situation what we know today. It’s as simple as that.”
Times have changed a lot compared to the early 2000s, when all Western countries encouraged the Chinese economy to join the march of trade liberalism. In 2001, under President Bill Clinton, the US administration supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). A membership that China quickly knew how to make the most of: ten years later, it became the world’s second largest economy.
But, contrary to what many Western experts had expected, this was not accompanied by a political liberalization of China. First, in 2008, the banking and financial crisiswith the many bankruptcies it caused in America, led Chinese leaders to decide to stay away from Western ways of operating, thus keeping China in a closed system. After Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, this trend was amply confirmed at the same time as Chinese political power strengthened its authoritarian character.
“No one really believes that the United States or China would willingly engage in a war with incalculable consequences.”
At the same time, the distrust of the Chinese economy developed by the Trump and then Biden administrations is accompanied by a strategy aimed at isolating China. Already in 2019, Donald Trump had launched his country into a vain rapprochement with North Korea, the aim of which was, it seems, to break the alliance between the Pyongyang regime and China. In recent years, around Joe Biden, we have seen that in the South China Sea, there have been incessant incidents between the Philippine Navy and Chinese ships.
As early as August 2021, while in Singapore, Kamala Harris believed that “These actions by Beijing continue to undermine the international order based on rules and threaten the sovereignty of nations” before adding that “The United States stands united with our allies and partners in the face of these threats.”. Since then, in 2024, the Philippine government has reached an agreement with Japan and the United States: this, among other things, establishes common defense provisions.
A thousand suspicions
On the other hand, Japan, concerned about China’s expansionist tendencies, also moved closer to South Korea in March 2023, with the two countries committing to a revival of high-level trade. Washington welcomed this “new chapter” relations between Tokyo and Seoul, while Beijing did not hide its surprise, as the historical disagreements between these two countries seemed to prevent them from reconciling.
In particular, it seemed difficult to overcome disputes, such as that of the Korean women who had been forcibly taken away. to serve as “comfort women” to Japanese soldiers, while from 1910 to 1945 Japan had colonized the Korean peninsula. Since the end of World War II, Japan has refused to acknowledge any fault of its army.
Korean survivors have regularly protested for compensation, to no avail. But suddenly, in 2023, the Korean government announced that it was he who was going to compensate the few “comfort women” still alive. This element is emblematic of the fact that the priority between South Korea and Japan is now to present a common front against China.
The distrust expressed by countries to the east of its territory leads China not to dissociate itself from Russia in the west. If Putin’s regime were to collapse, there would be a risk, seen from Beijing, that a government favorable to the West and America would be installed in Moscow. In this hypothesis, China would be surrounded by hostile countries – a scenario that the Chinese leaders absolutely want to avoid.
What will the White House’s China policy be after the November election?
But behind all the possibilities of encirclement that it fears, China sees the hand of the United States. Could this get worse? According to André Chieng, “No one really believes that the United States or China would willingly engage in a war with incalculable consequences. The fear is rather that an accident will occur that will draw the two powers into a war that neither of them wants. And the most likely trigger would be Taiwan.” But André Chieng is one of those who think that China can wait until parties in favour of dialogue with Beijing win upcoming legislative elections in Taiwan.
For now, in January 2024, the Taiwanese have elected as president Lai Ching-te, the representative of the independence party that preaches for proximity to the United States. This is the third time that the Taiwanese have snubbed Beijing by electing a candidate from this party. To show its discontent, the People’s Republic of China regularly sends its air force and navy to carry out exercises as close as possible to Taiwanese territory, sometimes pushing the provocation to the point of entering the island’s airspace.
Of course, in the event of a real Chinese attack, Taiwan would only have a chance of resisting with unconditional support from the American military. In Beijing, what this support might be is tempered by observing that the United States has not deployed sufficient weaponry in Ukraine to allow it to prevail over Russia.
No favorite candidate for China
What will the White House’s China policy be after the November election? Both candidates have someone with experience of China at their side. Tim Watts, whom Kamala Harris chose as vice president, was an English teacher in Beijing when he was about 25. He witnessed the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Back in America, he went back to China for his honeymoon in 1994.
Tim Watts subsequently visited China more than thirty times and founded an association with his wife, Educational Travel Adventureswhose scholarship program allows American students to travel and study in China. After thinking that reforms would bring political freedom to China, Tim Watts does not hide his criticism today on the state of human rights, censorship or repression in Tibet.
According to Chinese media, Tim Watts is certainly not an advocate of the Chinese regime, but he understands China better than the rest of the American political class. Before him, alone among the leading American politicians, George Bush Sr. had lived in China, where he had served as ambassador from 1978 to 1982 before being elected president of the United States in 1989.
Regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, there may be reasons to revive Sino-American relations.
For his part, Donald Trump has obtained the support of billionaire industrialist Elon Musk. Since 2019, he has had a large proportion of his Tesla electric vehicles assembled in Shanghai in a huge «Gigafactory». A battery factory is also operating and a second one is about to open. The special feature of this production is that the brand has obtained permission not to be associated with a Chinese partner – a first for a foreign company in China. Elon Musk now has both high-level interests and connections in China. To set up his Tesla factory in Shanghai, He became particularly close to Li Xiang who was then the city’s Communist Party secretary and is now China’s premier.
Beyond these two figures, it is not certain that the Chinese leaders have a preference between the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate. Donald Trump made a trip to Beijing at the beginning of his term in office, in 2017, before launching his policy of trade sanctions against China the following year. Xi Jinping went to the United States in April 2017 and Donald Trump announced to him during a meal, at dessert time, that the American air force was bombing Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, which benefits from at least economic support from China.
Kamala Harris, for her part, met Xi Jinping once. It was in November 2022, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Summit (APEC) in Bangkok. The White House had indicated that the American vice-president had insisted on the need to “maintaining open lines of communication to responsibly manage competition between the United States and China”.
Regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, there may be reasons to revive Sino-American relations. China, where consumption is not picking up, would benefit from being able to boost its exports to the United States, which, for its part, would benefit from turning to a Chinese market lacking agricultural products and energy sources. But there is no indication that economic and commercial exchanges could resume under the next president. And it is probably not in an American-style election campaign that such a development could be announced.
Source: www.slate.fr
