The next American president will be a China hawk

ALTHOUGH BRITAIN still claims to have a “special relationship” with the United States, no country could contest China’s claim to have the most important one. America’s next president will have to take stewardship of the bilateral relationship at a time when mutual animosity and distrust are high. He or she will have to steer carefully to avoid fracturing the global economy or, much worse, plunging two of the world’s military superpowers into an armed conflict.

Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democratic congressman who is the party’s highest-ranking member on the influential House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, identifies three top issues in the next president’s China portfolio. First, how to deter conflict, “especially in the South China Sea and Taiwan area”. Second, China’s “use of technology to surveil, to hack and to pre-position malware in our critical infrastructure”. And third, China’s “economic aggression”, particularly “overcapacity in the green-goods sector”, such as in the country’s export-driven solar and electric-vehicle industries.

A hardline stance towards China is firmly bipartisan. No matter what the election result is, that will not change. Mr Krishnamoorthi says Xi Jinping, China’s president, does not grasp “the depths of people’s anger” towards the Chinese Communist Party “for any number of reasons”. Inside America, the anger flows not just from the loss of jobs to unbalanced trade but also from fentanyl deaths—“the fact that the vast majority of fentanyl precursors come from China, and they’re not doing anything about it.”

As a result of a law championed by congressional China hawks, ByteDance, a China-based company, will be forced to sell TikTok, the social-media company it owns, to an approved owner by January 19th 2025 or else it will be banned in America. The company is contesting the legality of the forced sale in court.

Eyck Freymann, a China scholar at the Hoover Institution, a think-tank, also puts the next president’s China problems into three groupings. Handily, these are alliterative: “trade, tech and Taiwan”. On trade, “China’s overcapacity problem is getting worse,” Mr Freymann says, but the government cannot abide mass unemployment in its outward-facing economy. Donald Trump’s solution is broad-based tariffs of 60% on Chinese goods. Kamala Harris opposes these, but she would still have to manage frictions with Mexico, Europe and countries in South-East Asia if they become even larger conduits of Chinese goods into America than they already are.

On technology, neither candidate would ease President Joe Biden’s expansive export controls for sensitive goods such as advanced semiconductors. Ms Harris would perhaps make technocratic adjustments to the “small yard, high fence” approach that Jake Sullivan, Mr Biden’s national security adviser, has touted. The policy is supposed to ensure not just American military supremacy but also command of the technologies of the future, including artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Ms Harris would probably remain an adherent of the other China-policy slogan of the Biden administration, “derisking, not decoupling”.

A Trump administration could be quite different. Robert O’Brien, a former (and perhaps future) national security adviser under Mr Trump, wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs published this summer that “Washington should, in fact, seek to decouple its economy from China’s,” which he said Mr Trump had actually begun to do “without describing it as such”. Mr O’Brien is one of several “superhawks” in Republican circles—including Matt Pottinger and Mike Pompeo, other former senior Trump-administration figures—who are likely to rile Chinese officials more than the Democrats. Whether Mr Trump will actually listen to them, or will instead choose a more transactional approach with Mr Xi, of whom he has spoken admiringly, is a very different matter.

Such nuances involving Washington’s China factions will matter hugely when it comes to the most vexing challenge of all: continuing to deter China from a military invasion of Taiwan. Arms sales to Taipei have increased considerably, even as the formal policy remains “strategic ambiguity”—deliberate uncertainty over how extensively America would intervene if China attacked. A military conflict in the Taiwan Strait between two nuclear-armed superpowers would be harrowing. It would also be an economic calamity and would probably trigger a global recession.

And these are not the only tensions that need managing. Elsewhere in the South China Sea, Chinese coastguard vessels, often backed by navy ships, have repeatedly rammed and harassed coastguard ships from the Philippines, with which America has a treaty alliance. Japan and South Korea are willing to shade themselves under America’s nuclear umbrella for now. If in doubt, they have the industrial and scientific ability to construct their own.

It is no wonder then that America’s allies, especially those in Asia, are waiting for the election results with gritted teeth. If the next president mishandles relations with China, it will have dire consequences for them all. ■

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