The Trump-Biden admin years will go down in history as a key period of transition in Chinese and world politics.
Before Trump-Biden, China’s primary objective was to seek common ground and accommodate the US as much as possible to try to limit the negative spillover to the US from China’s re-emergence to achieve a win-win scenario where both China and America can live with each other as peers if not equals and as co-leaders of the world. This was best exemplified in the way China helped the US and west contain and mitigate the 2008 financial crisis that western greed created with no complaint or attempts to capitalise on the west’s troubles by seeking unreasonable terms or advantages as conditions for China’s vast and generous assistance.
Trump first ripped off America’s carefully crafted and long maintained mask with his crude bumbling aping of a mafia boss to try to shake down China.
Alone, the negative impact of such a toxic Presidency might have been contained by pinning the blame on Trump the person if followed by a more reasonable successor administration. However, Biden’s administration showed itself to be, if anything, even more deeply and fundamentally hostile and unaccepting of a rising China than Trump’s. The fact that anti-China sentiment is bipartisan and so deep rooted expunged all remaining doubt within the minds of China’s leaders and most Chinese citizens that America will never tolerate China’s rise.
Consequently, Chinese policy and strategy has fundamentally changed from one of avoiding a new global cold and possible hot war, to winning it. Xi’s inauguration speech as good as spelled it out.
I think we are now in the period of the quiet before the storm. This may be a longer period of peace than many might expect, as China systematically puts pieces in position globally, but it is not stable long term.
In the future, when later western generations lament the waste and destruction to come and ask where it all started to go wrong, remember what Trump, and especially Biden did to sow the whirlwind.
It is literally like the Amber Heard divorce... She thought she could get away with ruining Depp's career on top of getting all the settlement money but look at her now, shopping in JC Penny with no upcoming movie roles.
