The U.S. presidential election attracts more worldwide attention than national elections in any other nation – small or big. With tens of thousands of people having already voted in advance, expectations are that voter turnout is going to be a record high on November 5. The world is watching to see who eventually wins the election: former President Donald Trump or current Vice President Kamala Harris. And perhaps no nation has more at stake in the outcome than China.
In a little over 3-minute news video clip released on November 2, The Economist magazine’s geopolitics editor David Rennie, predicted China’s Xi Jinping will hope for a Trump victory. Rennie based his assessment on three factors – trade, security, and predictability,
On the same day, China’s leading digital news daily, guancha.cn, broadcasted a 2-hour live panel discussion with two of China’s leading experts on China-U.S. relations – Professor Huang Jing of the Foreign Affairs University in Shanghai and Professor Jin Canrong of the People’s University in Beijing. The experts mostly agreed that a Trump 2.0 administration in Washington will be easier for Beijing to deal with over the next four years. They also argued that, as the election enters the final phase, “Trump’s chances of winning are getting better and better.”
Interestingly, contrary to the official Chinese position that Beijing does not have a preference for either a Republican or a Democratic win, popular opinion as expressed on social media and op-ed columns in the mainstream media both have emerged favoring Trump (and him specifically, more so than the Republican Party in general) over Harris.
Why?
Security Policy
In its October 17 issue, The Economist cited a top Chinese Communist Party official, Jia Qingguo, as saying China would prefer Harris to Trump as the next U.S. president considering that bilateral ties deteriorated sharply during the latter’s presidency leading to serious confrontation. Jia is on the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) – an advisory body that forms a central part of the CCP’s United Front system.
In both popular discourse and in academia in China, the broad consensus is that a Republican or Democrat victory is not going to fundamentally make China-U.S. relations any better.
Yet some Chinese analysts do not entirely accept the view. Shao Shanbo, a Hong Kong-based scholar, in a recently published column in the mainland Chinese media maintained that the above “common” view is both “biased” and “inconsistent.” Shao argued:
The similarities between the two sides are that both regard China as the number one opponent. However, there are some differences between the two candidates in this basic consensus, because they have different views on the United States’ own situation and its role in the international arena. And that is going to be important in their respective China policy.
From a security perspective, Xi seeks to establish China as the number one power in Asia and in the Asia-Pacific region. If Trump is elected, Beijing is more likely to benefit from the way the United States (mis)handles international relations. Some overseas experts too think “China views Trump’s election with a degree of schadenfreude since they believe it casts doubt over America’s relationship with allies such as South Korea, Japan and the Philippines.” In Shao’s view, China is well aware of Trump’s fickle, unprincipled, and extreme personality, but fundamentally Trump’s “America First” and “Make America Great Again” slogans mean that he “wants America to shrink and reduce its global responsibilities. And that will be good for China’s strategic interests in Asia and in the Asia-Pacific.”
Business and Trade
In Trump’s successful campaign in 2016, he emphasized that China got rich by damaging the economic interests of the United States. He promised a trade war with China and he delivered. This time around, Trump is predictably consistent that China’s growth momentum is built on “theft of intellectual property rights” and “unfair trade practices,” which will inevitably shake the leadership of the United States in the long-run. Hence, the United States must “suppress” China’s momentum in order to protect the U.S.’ own interests.
Harris too, in keeping with the Biden administration’s approach, has argued that China’s rise will challenge U.S. and Western values, shake Washington’s global leadership and replace the U.S.-led international order. Therefore, China must be prevented from further development in the high technology and defense sectors.
As reflected in the guancha.cn online panel discussion cited above, Chinese experts expect that Trump 2.0 will inevitably intensify conflicts and differences between the United States and its allies and partners, which weaken their unity and cooperation. Several Chinese commenters have cited a Financial Times report from August, which claimed the European Commission has already set up a dedicated team of officials to prepare for the potential return of Trump to the White House after the U.S. elections in November. With even Biden’s efforts to win over allies to contain China during his term – such as the Quad and AUKUS – falling short, a new Trump four-year term will give China more room to improve relations with Europe, Japan and South Korea.
The Russia Factor
In a recent policy paper, Professor Michael Fox of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House warned of the results of a Trump victory: “a deal with Putin, targeting Iran…if Donald Trump wins in November and is as good as his word, America may add to global uncertainty and hand its rivals diplomatic victories.”
For most strategic affairs experts in China, this is precisely the reason Beijing will be hoping for a Trump win. Many in China believe the impact of Trump’s election on allies and partners will first be felt in Europe, then Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Experts such as Shao Shanbo reckon the first to be affected will be the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Besides going out of his way to “appease” Russian leader Vladimir Putin during his presidency from 2017-2021, Trump has been repeatedly calling for putting an end to the war in Ukraine. Moreover, coupled with his boasting of personal relationship with Putin, Trump’s latest claim during the last leg of the campaign is that he will break the Beijing-Moscow “alliance.” In an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Trump said, “They [the Biden administration] allowed Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and others to unite. I want to break them up.”
To this, Shan reacted by saying, “With Trump’s election, it is still possible that U.S.-Russia relations may change for the better, which is not bad from China’s point of view. But such a turnaround in Russia-U.S. ties is impossible under the Harris administration.”
On Taiwan
Taiwan is no doubt one issue that Beijing is most concerned about. It is also one of the areas where the differences in views and policies between Harris and Trump are most apparent, which has big implications for China.
If elected, Harris no doubt will implement the Biden administration’s policy of attaching great importance to the strategic role of the “first island chain” in the Pacific and – from China’s perspective – “using” Taiwan to provoke China. On the contrary, most Chinese experts agree Trump has a different approach on Taiwan. Trump has been saying that Taiwan has no bearing on basic U.S. interests while also arguing it does not have a role in geopolitics. In fact, Trump once compared U.S. support for Taiwan to an insurance policy, implying it is purely a business transaction.
But many in Taiwan maintain that it doesn’t matter who enters the White House; the eight-year continuity from the Trump to Biden era will remain unchanged under the new U.S. president in 2025. In the opinion of Claus Soong of MERICS:
The Trump administration arguably set the tone for the high-level engagement with Taiwan that was taken up by the Biden Administration – for example, with the 2022 visit of the then US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi. This continuity shows that countering China will remain a core policy focus, regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat is in power.
No external factor or foreign policy issue is going to determine the outcome of the vote on November 5. But Trump has told U.S. voters in no uncertain terms that, if re-elected, he is not going to continue to spend hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayers’ money to fight other countries’ wars – whether in Ukraine, the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, or in West Asia. And so for China, the stakes are high in the U.S. presidential vote on November 5.
It is therefore no coincidence that China has convened a crucial meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on November 4-8.