Joe Biden and China

When former Vice President Joe Biden became President-elect Biden in November 2020, it sparked the usual wave of prognostication about what his foreign policy will look like. Of particular interest is Biden’s future China policy, given that the two countries are poised on the edge of a modern-day Cold War. And in Biden’s case, analysts have a wealth of material to comb through to gauge his approach.

Not since George H.W. Bush, another former vice president, won his presidential race in 1988 has a U.S. president-elect boasted such deep experience on foreign policy in general and China in particular. And in a note of caution, Bush (in stark contrast to his son) is generally remembered for his foreign policy successes – with his handling of China as a notable exception.

Biden first visited China all the way back in 1979, part of a group of U.S. senators who met with Chinese leadership just after the normalization of diplomatic relations. He would visit several more times as a member (and later chair) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – including a trip in 2001 just before China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

But Biden’s experience with China in the Obama administration is of the most interest, in part because it involved extensive interactions with Xi Jinping, currently China’s president and top leader of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Back in 2011, the Obama administration was trying to figure out how to best build a relationship with Xi, who was then China’s vice president but clearly the big-man-in-waiting. The solution was to assign Biden, a fellow vice president, to spend an extensive amount of time with Xi, starting with a visit to China in 2011. Biden’s national security advisor at the time, Antony Blinken, called the trip a way of “investing in the future of U.S.-China relations.” Little did he know that nine years later that investment would still be paying off.

Xi undertook a reciprocal visit to the United States in February 2012. As his host, Biden accompanied the Chinese leader on his cross-country tour. Biden also met with Xi in December 2013, after Xi had officially ascended to the presidency, while on a trip to China. The end result, Biden told the Council of Foreign Relations in 2018, was “25 hours of private dinners with [Xi], just he and I, and one interpreter.”

What did Biden actually take away from his close interactions with China’s leader? He assessed that Xi would be a challenge, due to his whole-hearted belief in the superiority of the Chinese Communist Party and its system. But while Biden may have recognized the challenges posed by Xi and his more assertive stance, his views on China don’t seem to have markedly changed as a result. In his own way, Biden is the inverse of Xi: he firmly believes the American system gives it an advantage over China – even now. That is root of his confident (and much-quoted) remark on the campaign trail that China is “not competition for us.”

Biden does see China’s trade and economic practices as a serious issue. In a January 2020 article for Foreign Affairs outlining his foreign policy vision, Biden acknowledged that “The United States does need to get tough with China.”

“If China has its way, it will keep robbing the United States and American companies of their technology and intellectual property,” he wrote. “It will also keep using subsidies to give its state-owned enterprises an unfair advantage – and a leg up on dominating the technologies and industries of the future.”

But he also believes that the proper counter-strategy would not look like the Trump administration’s trade war; Biden has called Trump’s tariffs “erratic” and “self-defeating.” In that sense, his views on the U.S.-China trade relationship are largely in line with what he expressed in a previous presidential run, all the way back in 2008: “You don’t need to start a trade war. All you have to do is enforce the law.”

Instead, Biden believes the key to countering China lies in forging strong relationships with other trade partners, to emphasize the global norms and practices embraced by the United States and its allies in Europe, Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere. The other key piece of the Biden strategy is heavy investment in the United States, rebuilding its economic system and democratic values. “To win the competition for the future against China or anyone else, the United States must sharpen its innovative edge and unite the economic might of democracies around the world to counter abusive economic practices and reduce inequality,” Biden wrote in Foreign Affairs.

Or as one of Biden’s top foreign policy advisers, Jake Sullivan, put it in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the United States “should put less focus on trying to slow China down and more emphasis on trying to run faster ourselves.”

Biden also has a long history of speaking out about China’s human rights issues. Appalled by the crackdown on peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, for instance, he introduced legislation that would create Radio Free Asia to promote democratic values in China. Nearly 20 years later, in a presidential primary debate in 2008, he raised the need to “hold China accountable at the United Nations” over human rights violations. “Name me another country we would allow to conduct themselves the way China has,” Biden demanded.

As vice president, he continued to raise human rights issues in meetings with China – but he was more frank than most U.S. officials about the limited impact of such talks. In 2013, he told a group of China-based journalists for U.S. outlets that Xi seemed “unmoved” by Biden’s warnings.

While Biden can and does speak out in defense of human rights, he is at heart a pragmatist in two crucial ways. First, he understands the limits of the United States’ ability to force change on the CCP’s approach to human rights and, second, he frankly admits there are other priorities at play that might outweigh rights concerns.

Still, during the 2020 campaign, Biden criticized Trump for not responding strongly enough to the ongoing crackdowns in Hong Kong and on the Uyghurs. He pledged to increase the use of sanctions, suggesting he sees financial penalties as having the potential to change Chinese behavior.

Perhaps the most important unifying thread in Biden’s China views is his tendency to downplay Beijing as a serious threat – both because of his belief in U.S. resilience, but also because of China’s own systemic issues. Biden seems confident that, if the United States can get domestic policy right, it will inevitably keep its paramount position in the global economy – and the world order.

“Some here and in the region see China’s growth as a threat, entertaining visions of a cold-war-style rivalry or great-power confrontation,” Biden wrote in a 2011 op-ed for the New York Times, shortly after his visit to Beijing. “I reject these views… I remain convinced that a successful China can make our country more prosperous, not less.”

In the same article, Biden urged readers “to keep China’s rising economic power in perspective.” In particular, he espoused the view that China cannot innovate because of its restrictions on free speech and creativity, arguing that “for [China] to make the transition to an innovation economy, it will have to open its system, not least to human rights.”

More broadly, in a separate speech in 2011, Biden said that “there is no way [China] can sustain that growth” because of the demographic issues stemming from “that God-awful one child policy.”

The view that the United States has an inherent, systemic advantage in innovation and thus technology development was once widespread, but has lost major ground alongside China’s demonstrated prowess in technologies like 5G and quantum computing. Likewise, the idea that China’s economic rise is doomed to stagnation by structural flaws has shown no evidence of bearing borne out by actual results.

But Biden still seemed to hold on to this basic view during his latest presidential campaign. “They’re not competition for us,” he said on the campaign trail in May 2019, dismissing the idea that China is “going to eat our lunch.”

Of particular note is that Biden seems to conceptualize China as a threat largely in the economic space. Part of this is the reality of campaigning, where the economy is a major concern for voters – even when it comes to foreign policy issues. But the key assumption that China is not a true threat to overtake the United States economically also has implications for the security and geopolitical competition. If China’s development is inherently limited by its flawed system, as Biden seems to believe, there is less need to be concerned about it overtaking the United State militarily or in terms of global leadership.

Biden is far from alone in subscribing to what we might call the “American exceptionalism” theory of U.S.-China relations, although it has become less popular lately. In fact, it’s a key assumption underlining what James Mann famously termed the “China Fantasy,” which holds (in essence) that China must either reform to something more like a liberal, democratic system or remain hamstrung in its ambitions.

This is not to suggest that Biden’s views on China have not evolved at all. “Mr. Biden’s 20-year road from wary optimism to condemnation – while still straining for some cooperation –  is emblematic of the arc of U.S.-China relations,” the New York Times wrote in an article overviewing Biden’s “China journey.”

Likewise, even though several rumored contenders to head Biden’s State Department are all Obama administration stalwarts – such as former National Security Advisor Susan Rice and former Deputy Secretaries of State William Burns and Antony Blinken – we shouldn’t expect a redux of Obama era policy. Biden and his top advisers (and, frankly, nearly the entire China-watching community in the United States), have soured on Beijing, faced with Xi’s assertive actions.

But to Biden, competition with China seems to translate more into making the United States the best it can be, rather than taking punitive measures. Buoyed by faith in America – and a corresponding skepticism of China’s potential to truly compete – Biden’s China policy will look a lot different than Trump’s. Whether that’s admirable idealism or simply naivety is in the eye of the beholder.