Issues

Foreign Policy Priorities:
China

The increasingly confrontational U.S.-China relationship has aroused international concern and become a central issue in the 2020 race, heightened by the pandemic of the new coronavirus disease, COVID-19, that originated there. The United States has long sought to manage China’s rise by integrating the country—now one of the world’s two largest economies—into global institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the hope that China would fully accept the prevailing international order. But U.S. policymakers have struggled to respond to Beijing’s growing assertiveness, including what experts call its unfair trade practices and its maritime and territorial claims in the South China Sea and elsewhere. There are also growing concerns over repression of the country’s Muslim Uighurs and other minorities, Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure plan to expand its influence across Eurasia, the national security risks posed by Chinese tech firms, and the future of Hong Kong and Taiwan. 

The Barack Obama administration sought its own balance with China, stepping up WTO trade enforcement measures and blocking several high-profile acquisition deals involving Chinese companies, even while working with Beijing to complete the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate. Obama also announced a “strategic pivot” toward the Asia-Pacific region, the centerpiece of which was a twelve-nation trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which excluded China. 

President Donald J. Trump has embarked on a more combative and unilateral course, rejecting the TPP and issuing tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese imports. His administration has framed China as a great power rival, even though Trump himself has occasionally sought closer ties with Chinese President Xi Jinping. And Trump has accused China of covering up its role in the coronavirus crisis, stepping up his efforts to incentivize U.S. companies to return their supply chains to the United States. As these tensions have escalated, Democratic candidate Joe Biden, too, has sounded the alarm over the threat the Asian giant poses, putting forward his own proposals on how to respond to the challenge.

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More than a million Muslims have been arbitrarily detained in China’s Xinjiang region. The reeducation camps are just one part of the government’s crackdown on Uyghurs.

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China’s industrial policy is aimed at rapidly expanding its high-tech sectors and developing its advanced manufacturing base, but President Trump and other leaders of industrial democracies see the plan as a threat.

This project was made possible in part by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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