China Missing Trump Terribly As Biden Hits ‘Hard Power’

The Donald Trump-was-hard-on-China myth is having a rough few months as Asia’s biggest economy surges toward 8% growth in 2021.

Though the U.S. is recovering, too, China’s post-Covid-19—and post-Trump—bounce back is turning heads everywhere. But the head-turner that matters most is how Joe Biden, just four months into his presidency, has China’s Xi Jinping on the defensive in ways the Trump gang didn’t in four years.

No, China isn’t quaking over Biden’s arrival. But Xi is realizing fast that the days of exploiting complete chaos in Washington to achieve his broader goals are over.

The latest evidence of that comes from Kurt Campbell, Biden’s man in the Indo-Pacific for the National Security Council. Speaking at a Stanford University event, Campbell said the obvious: “The period that was broadly described as engagement has come to an end.” He said, too, that Beijing’s recent exploits indicate a pivot toward “harsh power, or hard power” and “signals that China is determined to play a more assertive role.”

But the second part of Campbell’s argument is enough to ruin the second half of Xi’s 2021. The Biden White House, he said, is devising a “new set of strategic parameters” and that “the dominant paradigm is going to be competition.”

The first part is Biden’s plan to use “all available tools” to push back on China’s unfair trade tactics. As his administration said in a March report: “Addressing the China challenge will require a comprehensive strategy and more systematic approach than the piecemeal approach of the recent past.”

In other words, less tweeting—Trump’s preferred approach—and fewer indiscriminate tariffs that hurt American interests more than China’s. The most demanding economic metric of Trump’s trade war own-goal: America’s deficit with Beijing was even bigger after he left office.

It’s hard to overstate the “opportunity cost” for America. While Trump was typing angrily into his smartphone, making coal great again, browbeating Detroit to bringing back gas guzzlers and defriending allies, Xi’s team poured trillions of dollars into where China plans to be in 2025. That would be at the forefront of everything from renewable energy to aerospace to self-driving vehicles to biotech to semiconductors to artificial intelligence.

The reason Xi misses Trump is that chaos in Washington created a gaping void into which China jumped. Not just in raising China’s own economic game, but seizing on Trump’s biggest missteps. Case in point: Trump walking away from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal meant to curb China.

After Xi stopped popping champagne corks, Beijing signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. RCEP is a 15-nation grouping that puts China directly at the center of global supply chains—with the U.S. looking on from the sidelines.

Trump was so easy for Xi to play. Xi knew Trump was so desperate for a splashy art-of-the-deal trade pact that China could have its way with Hong Kong, troll Taiwan and do what it wanted with Muslim minorities in the north-western Xinjiang region. Beijing curried Trumpian favor by lavishing a slew of China patents to first daughter Ivanka Trump.

Right out of the gate, Team Biden hit China for “government-sanctioned forced labor programs,” a topic on which Xi had been enjoying America’s relative silence. It called Beijing out for “genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs.”

Now, Biden is going where Trump never really did: demanding a global investigation into the origins of Covid-19. Sure, Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claim they were tough on China over the coronavirus. But bluster, tweets and spin aren’t policy. Leaving the World Health Organization, the institution best equipped to find answers, let China off the hook.

Biden is now standing with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whose government stood almost alone in its demand for pandemic answers from Beijing. And paid an economic price as China suspended “indefinitely” high-level dialogue with the biggest customer for Australian goods.

And it won’t be pretty. Xi loathed Trump’s taxes on as much as $500 billion on mainland goods, efforts to suffocate Huawei Technologies and bans on other tech giants and unhinged Twitter rants. But these were manageable challenges for Xi’s financial managers.

Biden calling China on the issues it doesn’t want to address in the court of global opinion—from state subsidies for companies, retrograde labor practices, censorship, its handling of Covid-19—is Beijing’s nightmare. So is the way Biden is working to build economic muscle at home.

Trump’s strategy for the economic marathon versus China was essentially throwing marbles into the road and tripping its competitor along the way. Biden’s is to limber up and actually compete, upgrade infrastructure and invest big in research and development.

Biden’s determination to reclaim America’s economic mojo already has Xi looking over his shoulder. And it’s about time.