The “U.S.-China confrontation” is a major issue in the U.S. presidential election, but Democratic presidential candidate Biden and his family have been unable to shake off their ambiguous relationship with Chinese politicians and businessmen. Bill Gertz, a senior military correspondent for the Washington Times, pointed out in an article on July 7 that Biden, who was neutral toward China until 1995, suddenly began to advocate that cooperation with China could win benefits for the United States.
In a speech at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, nine years ago, he called for closer ties between the United States and China at all levels. However, he has changed his attitude since the election, trying to appear more knowledgeable about dealing with China than Trump and criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “thug,” apparently intent on winning over voters who agree with Trump’s hard-line economic policies.
In the case of the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak, Biden accused Trump of improper epidemic preparedness and insisted he had a way to force China to allow international investigators into the country to investigate the source of the virus, but when Trump initially imposed a travel ban on China, Biden tweeted mockingly: “We must follow the path of science, not Trump’s deranged, xenophobic, fear-mongering approach.” In August, Biden also called for a reversal of hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs on China, but aides came out the same day to clarify that Biden would only review the tariffs, once again highlighting Biden’s wavering China policy.
From the beginning of the campaign, the Biden camp has been cleverly avoiding China issues. For example, in Iowa last May, Biden said of China’s economic threats: “Is China going to steal our jobs? Stop it, they’re not bad people, they’re not even close to us.” The team immediately went to work to put out the fire, emphasizing that Biden meant that whatever challenges the U.S. is facing pale in comparison to the structural and social challenges within China. Ironically, in an article in Foreign Affairs earlier this year, Biden changed his mind and said that the U.S. should focus on outperforming China.
In his early years, Biden was neutral on China, acknowledging its weapons expansion and human rights abuses, but after hiring Frank Januzzi, Ely Ratner, and Jeffrey Prescott as foreign affairs advisers, Biden moved to support “permanent most-favored-nation status for trade” and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO).
In September, Ratner and Prescott also wrote that when China established an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea in 2013, it was Biden who defended the U.S. right to use that airspace, without mentioning that the Obama administration’s inaction was the reason for China’s bold push to militarize the South China Sea. Campbell, a diplomatic advisor in the Biden camp and former assistant secretary of state for Asia-Pacific affairs, admitted that the Democratic Party now generally agrees that Trump was “mostly right” about China’s predatory behavior, and that Biden would have done a better job than Trump in working with his allies to deter China.
However, John J. Tkacik, a former China expert at the U.S. State Department, says categorically that Biden has always sought to embrace, not confront, China. Neither he nor his close foreign policy advisers are aware of China’s growing economic, military, and technological power. Moreover, Biden’s interaction with senior Chinese officials has always been close, and “I don’t sense that his preference for China and its leadership has disappeared.”
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