US election: what would the Trump and Biden foreign policy teams look like and how is China affected?

The poll on November 3 comes amid consensus that the US needs a tougher stance on China but the candidates diverge on trade, allies, immigration and decoupling

In discussion of China’s human rights failings, Biden has described Xi Jinping as a ‘thug’; Trump says if Biden wins, China wins

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Donald Trump says if Joe Biden wins the US presidential election, “China wins”. Photo: AFP

Published: 6:00pm, 25 Oct 2020Updated: 10:28pm, 25 Oct 2020

US President Donald Trump has been reaching into his 2016 playbook to target China during his re-election campaign, playing up his administration’s combative approach to Beijing and portraying his opponent Joe Biden as “soft” on China.

At a rally last week in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Trump honed in on this message: “This election is a simple choice – if Biden wins, China wins, all these other countries win, we get ripped off by everybody. If we win, you win, Pennsylvania wins, and America wins, very simple.”

Meanwhile, Biden slammed Trump’s “America first” policies for alienating the United States’ allies, describing the phase one trade deal with China as an “unmitigated disaster” and vowing to “build a united front of friends and partners to challenge China’s abusive behaviour”.

Their clash over China comes amid a growing consensus that the US needs a tougher stance against Beijing, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic. It also comes a time when many perceive the inability to liberalise China despite decades of engagement as a failure. The two men have built up foreign policy teams that reflect this debate.

On Trump’s side, his China advisers have been notably divided between the trade-focused camp, including US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and US trade representative Robert Lighthizer, and the China hawks, like US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger.

While Mnuchin and Lighthizer helped orchestrate the signing of the phase one trade deal with China, the intensifying strategic rivalry between Beijing and Washington across multiple fronts – including the technology war and coronavirus pandemic – has ceded space to the China hawks.

But despite efforts to push Beijing, China’s trade figures showed its surplus with the US was 43.6 per cent higher in September than in January 2017 when Trump first took office.