Decoding Biden’s China Strategy: Selective Decoupling and a New Engagement Under the Realities of Strategic Competition

***This commentary was adapted from a forthcoming analysis of Joe Biden’s past and present legislative and policy positions on China. This analysis will dissect Biden’s voting history from 1989-2008 as a U.S. Senator, his engagements with China as Vice President of the United States, and his more recent stated policies as the 2020 U.S. presidential candidate. Looking at Biden through this comprehensive lens is critical to understanding how he will attempt to influence the trajectory of U.S.-China relations if elected president.***

As perhaps one of the most contentious elections in U.S. history draws close to its dramatic conclusion, the conversation around the future of U.S.-China relations has intensified. From the turbulent negotiations over the Phase One Trade Deal to a growing push towards economic decoupling, American businesses and the international community have been scrambling to adapt to the ever-evolving U.S.-China relationship, which has been exacerbated even further as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic. It is already relatively clear what a second Trump administration would mean for this bilateral relationship. It has been less clear as to what a Biden administration would look like, particularly as it would begin immediately following the tumultuous Trump years.

Biden’s policy on China can be likened to the Chinese idiom, “打太极,” or “practicing tai chi.” On the one hand, Biden has carefully hidden most of his cards on how he will differ from Trump’s China policy. Yet, on the other hand, Biden’s past and present legislative and policy record shows that he has been very flexible and contradictory in his votes and his rhetoric, lacking a solid ground on where he stands on economic, societal, and security issues with China. With Biden having a significant chance of winning the election this November, the global community is scrambling to understand what U.S.-China relations will look like under a Biden-Harris Administration. Would Biden’s China policy simply be Obama 2.0? Will it be along similar lines of the Trump Administration’s policy of being ‘hard’ on China? Will it be some mixture of the two? Or, perhaps, something else entirely?

Up to now, Joe Biden has laid out his domestic policy far more clearly than his foreign policy. However, within the American foreign policy community at large, there is a growing sentiment that one of the greatest mistakes of past U.S. China policy, among both Democrats and Republicans alike, is that too much focus was placed on attempting to formulate policy that would change China’s development to a more palatable image to the West. More recently, there has been bipartisan support, including from Biden, to design a China strategy based on the realities on the ground rather than around what the U.S. hopes China to become.

The Obama Administration has often been characterized as having run under an engagement model that prioritized trade and investment with China over national security. The Trump Administration starkly reversed this order of priority, pursuing a policy of decoupling American supply chains and business dealings with China in key sectors. A Biden administration is unlikely to make a full reversal back to the Obama-era prioritizations, but functional changes are likely to occur. That being said, Biden has pledged to address many of the same trade and economic imbalances that the Trump Administration targeted to protect American firms, though these would manifest differently. Most prominently, if Biden wins the election, we will likely see his administration attempt to:

1. Cut the import tariffs over time, presumably to use as leverage on other issue areas and end the trade wars overall. But he will be doing this to help ease inflation and alleviate the burden on American consumers as well as assist American producers using Chinese intermediate inputs, likely not for the sake of improving U.S.-China relations. Although he outright said at one point that he would remove the tariffs, an aide later backtracked a bit, saying that he would “re-evaluate” tariffs on Chinese-made goods upon entering office.
2. Continue targeting many of the same Chinese trade practices and market distortions that the Trump Administration targeted. This would include state subsidies, production surpluses and dumping, currency manipulation, intellectual property, and forced technology transfers. However, less emphasis will be placed on the trade deficit, which could impact the direction of the Phase One Trade Deal that demanded higher Chinese imports of U.S. goods.
3. Be less hostile to more people-to-people exchanges (academic, cultural, scientific, etc.) than Trump’s administration. In Biden’s view, keeping these lines of communication open is in America’s best interest as they serve as sources of information on China. However, more attention will be paid towards human rights issues, which could take the form of additional sanctions on targeted Chinese firms or individuals. Kamala Harris is likely to be an influencing factor in this as well, especially seeing as she recently co-sponsored S.3744 – Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 and other human rights-focused legislation.
4. Be willing to engage in a military buildup in the Western Pacific as a deterrence to China’s increased militaristic assertiveness. Even further, Michele Flournoy, considered to be a top contender for Biden’s Secretary of Defense, suggested that the U.S. military must gain the capacity to “sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.” Simultaneously, however, Biden recognizes that the U.S. and China must cooperate on not only key strategic issues such as the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, but also transnational challenges such as slowing global climate change.

There is less firepower in the ‘engagement’ camp in the U.S.-China foreign policy community, regardless of left or right leanings. At present, there are debates going on within the Biden team between centrists and progressives as well as between globalist and isolationists. It is still too early to form a definitive picture on the outcome and their ramifications on trade and other policies with China. Despite this, some form of decoupling would be likely to continue under Biden in key sectors, although in a more nuanced and predictable manner.

This is largely because the U.S.-China economic relationship cannot go back to the way it was under the Obama Administration. This reality is not just a result of Trump policy, either. The relations between the countries also fall heavily on what China’s leaders desire in the future—either a revision of the global order, or a continued U.S.-China competition with the U.S. remaining as the global leader. Regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, we are likely to see China continue the aggressive pursuit of its national interests in the areas of security, technology, and financial services that the U.S. will feel compelled to respond to, likely at the cost of short-term American business interests. This marriage between economics and security policies would be likely to continue under Biden as would be actions similar to the recent sanctions on 24 Chinese state-owned companies involved in the militaristic build-ups in the South China Sea.

For much of his political career, Joe Biden has been a walking contradiction on China policy, shifting values as needed to achieve policy goals. For instance, on the one hand, he played a leading role in setting the stage for the current state of the US-China relationship during his long tenure as a Senator and as Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that caused hundreds of thousands of American jobs to move overseas. On the other hand, he has now laid out a plan to bring back American jobs through the Made in All of America initiative. Similarly, on the one hand, Biden has repeatedly condemned China’s record on human rights. Yet, on the other hand, he was quick to vote against any amendment that would hold China accountable if it potentially jeopardized establishing normal trade relations during the passage of the U.S.-China Relations Act of 2000.

Biden has been cautious to reveal too much of his foreign policy agenda on China. Thus, the question remains whether a transformed “Pivot to Asia,” dubbed by some as an unfinished legacy of the Obama Administration, could come to fruition under a Biden Administration.