‘Two bowls of poison’: Why China dreads both Trump and Harris

Singapore: No vote commands the attention of world leaders like the US presidential election. When millions of Americans line up to cast their vote on November 5, the Chinese Communist Party elite will be among those closely watching the verdict with the keenest of interest.

Whether voters send Kamala Harris or Donald Trump to the White House, their decision will shape the stability and security of the world for the next four years and beyond, pitting the commander of US power against the rising might of China and Xi Jinping’s global ambitions.

Beijing sees little upside for China in either a Kamala Harris presidency or second Donald Trump presidency.Credit: AP, Bloomberg, Marija Ercegovac

With two months until election day, the common view among Chinese scholars is that Beijing has no favourite in the race, with both candidates expected to maintain the Washington consensus that Xi’s China represents the single greatest challenge to the US-led liberal international world order.

“The general sense is that we will not see much difference in either a Harris administration or a second Trump administration,” said Professor Wu Xinbo, dean of Fudan University’s Institute of International Studies in Shanghai. Wu also serves on the policy advisory board of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“In the US, there is bipartisan consensus on China policy. It defines China as America’s primary strategic competitor.”

This view has been echoed more colourfully by another Chinese scholar, Zhao Minghao, also from Fudan University, in a phrase that has featured on high rotation in Western media reporting in recent months.

“Trump and Kamala Harris are two bowls of poison for Beijing,” Zhao told the UK’s Financial Times last month, having used the metaphor as far back as January when Joe Biden was still leading the Democratic ticket.

The future of the volatile US-China relationship has been a backseat issue in the presidential campaign so far, overshadowed by domestic debates such as the cost of living, LGBT rights and abortion. Foreign policy discussions have been dominated by the pressing crisis in Gaza and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

For her part, Harris has given Chinese officials little fresh content to scrutinise as they scour for any shades of difference that might exist between her and Biden. She has had little to say on China-related issues on the campaign trail beyond a line in her acceptance speech for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination last month, where she vowed to ensure that “America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century.”

In her only major TV interview since being anointed Biden’s replacement, China did not feature at all on CNN’s list of questions.

Friendlier times: Donald Trump and Melania Trump with Xi Jinping and Peng Liyuan at Mar-a-Lago in 2017. Credit: AP

Trump, by comparison, has repeatedly tapped a vein of working-class resentment toward China. He mentioned China 14 times in his Republican nomination acceptance speech in July, where he blamed the world’s second-largest economy for destroying American auto jobs and revived his “China virus” epithet about the COVID pandemic.

On the policy front, he has said he would impose tariffs of 60 per cent or higher on all Chinese imports if he wins a second term. But he has also expressed admiration for Xi, calling him “a brilliant man” and a “fierce person” because “he controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist”.

Both candidates should have the opportunity to expand on their views when they face off in their first presidential debate on Tuesday (US time) in Philadelphia.

While Beijing may see little upside to the long-term direction of the US-China relationship regardless of the election result, it is expected that a Harris administration would manage relations differently to a Trump administration.

Wu said that while the Chinese leadership would be actively preparing for either outcome, his impression was that “there is more concern over Trump” due to the former president’s unpredictability and the extremely hawkish stance on China held by some of his key allies in the Republican Party.

“Harris will be tough on China, to be sure, on the economic front, technology front, military front, and diplomatic front – but she will be more predictable than Donald Trump,” he said.

As Trump departed the presidential office in 2021, China imposed sanctions on 28 of his top officials, including outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, accusing them of “prejudice and hatred against China”.

It is expected that if they returned with Trump to the White House, they would be “very personal and irrational in dealing with China”, Wu said.

Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank, said there was also a widely held expectation among analysts in both China and the US that the Harris administration would pick up where Biden left off.

“That continuity translates to a lot of competition, but at the same time, a lot of effort to manage that competition so that the relationship will not derail into a confrontation or military conflict,” Sun said.

“That effort is very well received in China, so that in the end, the result may not be better, but the Chinese perception is quite different”.

In a move that surprised Chinese officials hoping for a recalibration after Trump’s departure from office in 2021, Biden maintained and even increased Trump-era tariffs on Chinese imports, including imposing a 100 per cent tariff on electric vehicles, and expanded the list of Chinese companies on a US export blacklist in a bid to cut off China’s access to high-end AI chips and technology.

Biden also sanctioned Chinese companies aiding Russia’s war efforts and stepped up America’s regional alliances with countries such as Australia, Japan and the Philippines to counter China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific.

But these measures have also been accompanied by more normalised diplomatic engagement, including regular meetings between high-level officials on both sides and the resumption of military-to-military communications in 2023.

Wang Yiwei, director of Renmin University’s Institute of International Affairs in Beijing and a former Chinese diplomat, said Harris was still a largely unknown quantity on China-issues, and noted that she had never been to China. She did meet with Xi on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Bangkok in 2022.

“We don’t know yet anything that she thinks [about China], but her personality is more soft [than Trump’s] and we expect more continuity of the Biden policy,” he said.

Trump’s isolationist approach to foreign policy has fuelled criticism from his rivals, who say he would weaken the US alliance system abroad, paving the way for China to strengthen its global influence and superpower status.

On Taiwan, for example, Trump has not matched Biden’s position that the US would defend the self-governed island in the face of Chinese aggression, and has instead complained that “Taiwan doesn’t give us anything”, “should pay us for defence” and had stolen America’s chip industry.

This stands in stark contrast to the strong support for Taiwan among Republican hawks, including Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance, who has said: “The thing that we need to prevent more than anything is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.”

Some Chinese scholars are quick to dismiss the theory that Beijing is hoping Trump returns.

“If Trump wins, yes, perhaps the US will face some domestic problems. But it doesn’t mean that China will benefit from that,” said Dr Sun Chenghao, a fellow at Tsinghua University.

Instead, he said it could further destabilise the US-China relationship because Trump could look to unite domestic opinion by channelling antipathy towards China.

“We are not sure who will join Trump’s cabinet and whether they will try to push Trump to have some hawkish politics towards Taiwan or the Chinese mainland. I think that will be very uncertain for us to observe,” Sun said.

Wu added: “Some people may believe that because Trump has a transactional style maybe at some point China can make a deal with him.”

But this was loaded with risk, he said.

“He is very unpredictable and sometimes he does not care about the consequences of his actions. That is a big problem. These are two most important countries in the world – if you take a very reckless approach to this relationship that creates big risk, not only for the two countries, but also for the entire world,” Wu said.

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