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Biden Administration International Affairs Personnel Tracker

Joseph Biden

President of the United States of America

The heat of the election forced Joe Biden to project that he could be just as tough on China as Donald Trump. However, there were stark differences between Biden and Trump on how to handle the numerous economic, societal, and security issues pervading the U.S.-China relationship. Biden’s lengthy political career provides a lens as to how he has evolved on China and where his priorities have shifted. As a Senator from 1972-2008 and member (and later Chair) of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Biden was instrumental in shaping the initial trajectory of the U.S.-China relationship since its normalization in 1979, particularly on trade.

Although Biden frequently co-sponsored or voted on legislation condemning Chinese human rights violations and security concerns, he, like many other Democrats and Republicans at the time, was quick to shift priorities in order to develop and maintain the rapidly growing economic relationship with China. While Vice President, Biden took the helm of the second Obama Administration’s China portfolio, he worked tirelessly to prop up the United States’ regional economic liberalization goals with strategic partners through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as well as supported a forward military presence in the Western Pacific to manage China’s increasingly assertive economic and foreign and security policy behavior.

Views On China

While the process of economic decoupling with China continued during 2021, with retaliatory trade measures of increased scope and stability, the Biden Administration has been consistently amenable to cooperation with China on matters like climate change. This cooperation reached a nadir with a U.S.-China Joint Declaration on climate change coming from the sidelines of the COP26 conference in November. However, Biden and Xi only had one virtual meeting in 2021 where no headway was made on wedge issues like Taiwan, human rights, and Indo-Pacific maritime rights.

Biden has clearly abandoned the Trump administration’s strategy to compete with China only through unilateral or bilateral actions, returning the U.S. to its former prominence on a multilateral basis. To jumpstart this initiative, he held the Summit for Democracy in December as a means of working together with other democratic governments to provide an alternative to China. The administration also expanded the scope of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), with two summits that promoted “a vision of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” and launched the AUKUS security pact to coordinate military capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region. Biden is also pushing for a broad Indo-Pacific Economic Framework that would see the U.S. role in Asia driven by consensus on digital trade, supply chain security, sustainability, and workers’ rights. 

For a comprehensive analysis on Joe Biden’s background and the evolution of his positions on China, see Decoding President-Elect Joe Biden’s China Strategy.

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Page Last Updated: January 11, 2022

*None of the personnel in this tracker are associated with the Institute for China-America Studies. All images used on this page are sourced from the official Biden-Harris transition website buildbackbetter.gov or the public domain.*