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In the months since Donald Trump cinched the Republican nomination, there has been much discussion among Western China analysts over which candidate Beijing prefers. Well before July 21st, when President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, this was already being widely discussed, with several articles and op-eds addressing the question published in English-language news outlets. In the weeks since Democrats converged quickly around Harris to lead the ticket, there has been plenty of additional speculation, especially after Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, given his extensive experience in China — he taught in Foshan for a year after 1989 and has made some 30 trips to China since.
So who would Beijing ultimately prefer? Right now, there’s simply no clear consensus that we can see among Chinese elites. Perhaps most importantly, it’s still anyone’s guess what the man at the top of the Communist Party thinks. All of Xi’s men have played their cards close to their chests, and what we can see in terms of preference comes only from Chinese social media and from a select number of Chinese analysts, some quite prominent, who have taken on the topic. Neither is a reliable indicator of what the Party leadership really thinks.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s even glancingly familiar with the popular Chinese discourse on American politics that the preponderance of social media posts in the aftermath of Biden’s endorsement of Harris appear to favor Trump and are critical of Harris. Since Harris’s elevation, the focus has tended to be on the salacious (e.g., Harris’s long-ago involvement with California politician Willie Brown), and posts about her are often based on undisguised sexism or racism.
This is not to say that there aren’t any posts in favor of Harris. Especially in the days after her Democratic National Convention speech, my admittedly unscientific impression is that there has been an uptick in Harris support, visible at the very least in more forceful pushback against those who’ve advocated for Trump.
There are, as far as I can tell, three distinct types of Chinese Trump supporters. The first advocates for Trump’s policies mostly without reference to their effect on China: they openly admire his “direct” style, embrace his ethno-nationalist ethos, and share his contempt for “woke” culture and the so-called baizuo Chinese they believe are disseminating it in China. (Baizuo is a pejorative that can perhaps be most accurately translated as “libtard.”) This type of Trump supporter , perhaps ironically, is often to be found among Chinese liberals, and these will sometimes see in Trump’s anti-communism and tough-on-China policies additional reasons to support him. But I’ve met not a few who are anything but liberal: avid supporters of the Party and of Xi who explain their support for Trump entirely from the imagined perspective of an American and admire Trump’s authoritarian tendencies for the same reason they do the Party’s.
Another group supports Trump mainly because they believe his isolationist, non-interventionist approach would benefit China. A Trump victory, they say, would diminish the odds of war. He’s unapologetically transactional and could be bought off — as he very nearly was just on the eve of the COVID crisis — by promises of big soybean purchases. This group, based on my conversations, often believes that his domestic policies will be bad for ordinary Americans, but that doesn’t factor into their preference for a Trump victory: Avoidance of war, a shift away from liberal interventionism, and an end to the American moral high-handedness that they associate much more with Democratic candidates are the chief reasons they’d rather see Trump win in November.
A third and probably best-known group is rooting for him precisely because they think a Trump victory would be disastrous for American power and would therefore be a boon for China. One of Trump’s nicknames in China is, after all, 川建国 — Chuān Jiànguó, or “Trump who Builds the Nation,” said nation being China. This is based on the idea that Trump’s gleeful assault on American institutions, his willful violation of norms, his degradation of and constant threats to blow up American alliances, his feckless decisions to pull out of the Paris climate agreement and the JCPOA or Iran Nuclear Deal, his shameless flirtations with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un have all made China look better by comparison, compelled Chinese to pull together, furthered China’s longstanding hopes for a more meaningfully multipolar geopolitics in which Europe has more strategic autonomy from the U.S. Like the second group, this third believes that if he wins the White House in November, U.S. foreign policy may take a sharp turn toward isolationism — toward narrowly-defined national interests that likely do not include the Second Thomas Shoal, the Diaoyu Islands, or — most significantly — Taiwan. Not only will he plunge America into internal strife, but he’ll abandon Ukraine to its fate, placing a fatal strain on NATO, he’ll double down on support for Israel, detonating whatever remains of American moral authority.
What about Chinese think-tankers, IR scholars, and Americanists? Leaving aside for now the question of how much (if any) influence they actually have in the highest echelons of the Party, where do they stand? Strikingly, they depart significantly from any of the three types described above. Last month, before Biden pulled out, Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of International Relations, told the South China Morning Post, “If Biden wins, the bilateral relationship will basically continue along the same path as it does now. But if Trump wins — and the possibility of his winning is growing — the economic confrontation between China and the US will increase, and it will be even more serious than their disputes on security.”
Writing in late 2023 in The Diplomat, the scholars Chen Dingding and Zhu Xinrong argued that while Trump’s likely approach to China — unilateralist and directly confrontational — would probably be disruptive and destabilizing in the short term, Biden’s policy by contrast, with its multilateral approach and focus on technology competition and economic de-risking, would do greater damage to the bilateral relationship in the long run despite efforts to re-engage with China and erect “guardrails.” They haven’t yet weighed in on how this might be different under a Harris presidency.
Da Wei, director of the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS) at Tsinghua University, told me in April on the Sinica Podcast that under the Biden administration, “the two countries at least successfully stabilized the relationship a little bit,” noting that Biden has been much more predictable than his predecessor. Biden represents “less surprise, more predictability,” Da said. The Biden administration’s focus is on making the U.S. more competitive, he noted: it focuses more on domestic policy and not so much on keeping China down. He contrasted this with the Trump administration, particularly in 2020, when Da says they embraced a policy of regime change. “I will say — and it’s not only I, myself, I mean, many people here still believe — the two parties, the two administrations are different. Of course, the commonplace is that both of them have kind of strategic competition policy. From China’s perspective, this is very negative to China. But I will say these are two different negative approach. So I don’t know which one is better, but I’m quite sure which one is more predictable.”
Many American “China-watchers” seem convinced that, whether they say so or not, Xi Jinping and the rest of the Chinese leadership share the logic of the third pro-Trump group I described, whose not-unironic support for Trump boils down to “the enemy of my enemy.” Others, like Yun Sun of the Stimson Center, echoing Da Wei, believe that for Beijing, it’s a choice of evils: either candidate’s administration would continue to pursue hawkish policies in trade and national security. “There’s no best-case scenario,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “There’s only the bad scenario and worse scenario.” Indeed, assuming Beijing has no inside knowledge about how a Harris administration would staff key positions — its National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, or the heads of other departments, agencies, and offices from Treasury and Commerce to the USTR — it makes some sense to assume continuity.
In the 2020 race, Trump himself concluded that Beijing’s preference was for Biden. In that contest, he may indeed have been correct: what, after all, could have been worse for China than Trump? From Beijing’s perspective today, that would be hard to say. But Beijing appears not to have attempted any interference. In March 2021, the National Intelligence Council released its report titled “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Election” which said, with respect to China:
“We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election. We have high confidence in this judgment. China sought stability in its relationship with the United States, did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling, and assessed its traditional influence tools— primarily targeted economic measures and lobbying — would be sufficient to meet its goal of shaping US China policy regardless of the winner.”
So far, we’ve seen no credible evidence of coordinated Chinese interference or disinformation campaigns aimed at the American electorate ahead of the 2024 race. This might be for the same reasons that China refrained from taking any action in 2020 — fear of getting caught and confidence in “traditional influence tools” — or it might be that China simply sees no upside in trying to put its thumb on the scale: after all, poll after poll showing a decline in American attitudes toward China don’t exactly attest to the efficacy of Chinese influence efforts. It could be, as Yun Sun and many others have said, that Beijing sees very little difference and that either outcome is bad for China.
It’s noteworthy, I think, that so few American China specialists have made the case for why a Harris victory might actually be preferable to Beijing. Surely Beijing’s strategic class sees some opportunity for an easing off of pressure compared to what they would likely have faced had Biden remained at the head of the ticket and actually won. The Biden administration’s China policy team, from Antony Blinken to Jake Sullivan, Kurt Campbell to Gina Raimondo, down to Ambassador Nichols Burns, has kept that pressure up. Though some changes in a hypothetical second Biden term would have been inevitable, there was little reason for optimism in Beijing. Instead, it would have been safe to assume more of the same: what Beijing sees as technological, and indeed comprehensive, containment. But a new cabinet and a new foreign policy team under Harris-Walz, should they prevail, could be an opportunity for, if not a “reset,” then at least a recalibration. I doubt Beijing’s so naive as to think that Tim Walz’s deep wells of empathy for the Chinese people will be sufficient to turn things around. But I give Beijing enough credit to say they know how tight this race is and would certainly not want to get off on the wrong foot with a Harris-Walz administration by having openly pulled for Trump-Vance.
As I’ve said, many — and here I’m going to go out on a limb and say most — American pundits and analysts who have weighed in have broadly assumed that Chinese leaders would reflect Chinese popular opinion and would prefer a Trump victory — usually based on the havoc that such an outcome would wreak on alliance systems, the so-called “rules-based international order,” and on American moral authority. Perhaps the widely-held assumption that China’s leaders would rather Trump win, though, says more about how Americans think than how the Beijing leadership actually does. Do Xi Jinping and those around him actually want to see a rapid, chaotic unwinding of American power or civil strife in American streets? I don’t believe so. China prizes stability, whether internal or external, and is keenly aware that external instability can easily translate into internal instability.
Perhaps the very fact that Beijing has kept quiet — or the possibility implied in their silence that Chinese leaders don’t want Trump and might even prefer a Harris victory — should force us to rethink some of the assumptions we’ve long held about China. Perhaps there’s more to China’s constant “win-win” refrain than mere rhetoric, and our assumption that Chinese leaders see competition with the U.S. entirely in zero-sum terms is a form of projection. Perhaps they understand how rankly hypocritical any interference or even any official preference would look, given their loudly proclaimed commitment to non-interference. Or perhaps they aren’t out to overturn every institution comprising the “rules-based international order” and are only selectively revisionist (as many smart analysts have argued) and are more invested in the existing order than we’ve tended to assume.
Our eagerness to divine Beijing's preferences says as much about our own biases as it does about China's strategic calculus. In the end, the question of whether Beijing wants Trump or Harris may be less important than what it reveals about our understanding of China — and ourselves — in this pivotal moment of global realignment.
Excellent! Good point on the slight revisionist part at the end. One thing maybe you could add is because the US buys into the idea that China wants to dismantle the international order, it will happen. If they didn't believe this, maybe there would be less "The US China rivalry for Africa" talk. Sometimes if you believe something enough, it happens.