Biden Plans to Build a Grand Alliance to Counter China. It Won’t Be Easy.
The president-elect wants a coalition of democracies to pressure Beijing to curtail what he sees as unfair practices; Xi Jinping has been thinking along the same lines
With tensions between the U.S. and China rising on many fronts, President-elect Joe Biden will take office aiming to align Western democracies to broadly pressure Beijing, a clear break with President Trump’s go-it-alone approach.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has been thinking along the same lines and is a step ahead, setting up an overt competition for global leadership. He has been busy in recent years trying to draw traditional U.S. allies into China’s economic orbit.
Moves this week by both Washington and Beijing are forcing China higher on the Biden agenda. Upon taking office he’ll need to decide whether to overturn recent Trump administration actions. They include delisting Chinese telecommunications companies on the New York Stock Exchange, banning transactions with Chinese-connected apps, including the Alipay payment platform, and blacklisting China’s largest computer chip maker and other firms.
Mr. Trump fought with allies on trade and security issues as he took on China and brought actions domestically that have been tied up in the courts, including seeking to shut down or force the sale of the Chinese-owned TikTok video-sharing app in the U.S.
Even so, Mr. Trump changed the tenor of the U.S.-China relationship by confronting Beijing on a number of issues. He also helped shape a growing consensus in Congress and the public that China isn’t just a competitor but also a threat to American global leadership.
Mr. Biden argues America needs to bring multilateral pressure to bear. Otherwise, Beijing can pit one country against another by offering preferential access to its vast market.
“China always saw an escape hatch through their economic relationships with others,” said Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s choice for national security adviser. “Only by closing off those escape hatches would you get China to curb their trade abuses.”
Given the lure of the vast Chinese market, Mr. Biden could face a tough time convincing allies to sign up for a united front against Beijing. China and the European Union, for instance, recently reached an investment treaty. U.S. allies say they can’t be sure of America’s long-term commitment to an international alliance, given four years of a unilateral approach.
China’s leaders will try to ease the tension with the U.S. that deepened during the Trump administration, according to Chinese officials. Beijing plans to dispatch its top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, to Washington shortly after Mr. Biden is sworn in to explore how the two countries could cooperate, said people with knowledge of the matter.
Short-term, there is a trade war to tend to. One issue is what price China is willing to pay—if any—for the U.S. to lift tariffs on about $370 billion in Chinese exports to the U.S. Biden advisers said the president-elect won’t roll them back soon. He plans to analyze the impact of the levies on the American economy and consult with allies before acting. Business groups that opposed the tariffs now say he should negotiate for concessions.
Beijing seems willing to wait. “Biden will sooner or later launch a renegotiation of the trade deal, as the current agreement is unrealistic,” said Shi Yihong, a foreign-policy adviser to the central government, referring to China’s purchasing targets. “A renegotiation is also in line with China’s wishes.”
Longer-term, Mr. Biden’s multilateralist strategy will be informed by one view he does share with the Trump administration, that China poses a broad challenge to U.S. economic and political leadership in the 21st century. The president-elect criticizes Beijing for robbing U.S. companies of technology, unfairly subsidizing its state-owned firms and suppressing human rights.
Some advisers who worked with him in the Obama administration, during which Washington cooperated with Beijing over the global financial crisis and other issues, now say the era of engagement is over, although they still look to Beijing for help on climate change and other Biden priorities.
“The trick is to navigate this in a way where we have all the tools we need to succeed in these various competitions with China,” said Antony Blinken, who served the Obama administration and is Mr. Biden’s choice for Secretary of State, “but at the same time keeping open channels to cooperation where it’s in our interest.”
Flagship effort
Mr. Biden’s flagship effort will be his Summit for Democracy. It is designed, he wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine last year, “to renew the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the free world.” The plan is modeled after a 2012 nuclear-security summit President Obama convened to limit the spread of nuclear material.
Mr. Obama’s summit included China’s leader. Mr. Biden’s is designed to exclude Mr. Xi and other authoritarian leaders.
During the campaign, Mr. Biden talked of creating “a united front of friends and partners to challenge China’s abusive behavior.” Although some former Obama China experts doubt he will describe the summit that way, it would be a clear message from the meeting.
Biden advisers said they also will push more focused forms of multilateralism. Mr. Sullivan, the Biden national-security adviser, named the Plaza Accord of 1985 where the U.S. and its allies intervened to weaken the dollar as a successful model of international economic cooperation.
He praised the American-Japanese-Australian pressure on China to lift its stranglehold on rare-earth minerals needed to manufacture high-technology products. Mr. Biden’s choice for U.S. Trade Representative, Katherine Tai, led the Obama administration’s rare-earth push.
The Biden team plans to recruit leading democracies for alliances on technology issues, his advisers said, including development of new telecommunications technologies that will lessen dependence on 5G equipment from Huawei Technologies Co. Biden advisers complain that the Trump administration’s efforts to block Huawei haven’t succeeded because the U.S. never developed an effective 5G alternative.
Several proposals would block sales to China of advanced semiconductor-manufacturing technology, dominated by firms in the U.S., Japan and the Netherlands, to try to keep Chinese semiconductor makers several generations behind.
“There’s a division in the world between techno-democracies and techno-autocracies,” Mr. Blinken said. “The techno-democracies have not done a very good job of organizing ourselves.”
A growing backlash among U.S. allies against aggressive Chinese behavior could play into Mr. Biden’s multilateralist hand. Beijing’s tightening grip on Hong Kong and bellicose diplomacy have added to tensions.
Rhetorically, at least, the Biden team has made clear it will make human rights issues a priority. “The Biden-Harris administration will stand with the people of Hong Kong and against Beijing’s crackdown on democracy,” Mr. Blinken tweeted Tuesday night after Hong Kong police arrested opposition politicians.
Practically, the president-elect’s options are limited. Mr. Trump largely ignored Hong Kong and other democracy issues, such as Chinese repression of Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang, for much of his tenure, though during the past year, his administration sanctioned Hong Kong officials involved in the crackdown and blocked exports of cotton from Xinjiang, among other actions. Mr. Trump didn’t take more drastic steps, which would be available to his successor, including cutting off Chinese banks from the dollar or seeking to delink the Hong Kong dollar from the greenback, which would likely hurt U.S. financial institutions in China.
One alternative that has been widely discussed: The U.S. could allow easy immigration for Hong Kong residents caught in the crackdown.
Some Biden advisers believe that the new administration will be as divided on human-rights issues, as the Clinton administration was at the start. Eventually President Clinton stopped pressing China on human rights and focused on building economic relations.
Potential reluctance
Potential partners might be reluctant to sign up for a U.S. effort to take on China after four years of Trump unilateralism—and with the possibility Mr. Trump or another similar politician could regain the presidency in 2024.
“You’d be asking countries to forego opportunities in the only major economy in the world that’s growing to do what?” said Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican ambassador to China who now advises companies on the China market: “To ally with the U.S., which has proved to be an unreliable partner.”
. It's so obvious whatever angle you see it.
