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BEIJING (AFP) – President Donald Trump has frustrated and enraged China during a tumultuous first term, but Beijing may welcome his re-election as he scans the horizon for the decline of its rival superpower.
Relations are as cold as at any time since formal ties were established four decades ago, and China has warned it does not want to be dragged into a new “Cold War” with the United States.
Under his slogan “America First,” Trump has presented China as the greatest threat to America and world democracy.
He launched a massive trade war that has cost China billions of dollars, harangued Chinese tech companies and blamed Beijing for the coronavirus pandemic.
But another Trump win in November may have its advantages for China, as President Xi Jinping seeks to cement his nation’s rise as a global superpower.
China’s leadership could have “the opportunity to advance its global position as a champion of globalization, multilateralism and international cooperation,” said Zhu Zhiqun professor of political and international relations of Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
Trump pulled the United States out of a sprawling Asia-Pacific trade and climate accords, slapped billions of dollars in tariffs on Chinese goods, and removed the United States from the World Health Organization at the height of a global pandemic.
Where the United States has withdrawn, Xi has stepped forward.
He presented his country as the champion of free trade and a leader in the fight against climate change, and promised to share any possible Covid-19 vaccine with the poorest nations.
“A second term from Trump could give China more time to rise as a great power on the world stage,” said Professor Zhu.
Philippe Le Corre, a China expert at the Harvard Kennedy School in the United States, agreed that an extension of Trump’s America First policies would be beneficial in the long run for Beijing.
“(This) partially separates Washington from its traditional allies,” he added, and that gave China room to maneuver.
China’s nationalists have openly cheered or booed Trump.
“The United States can be made eccentric and therefore hateful to the world,” Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a chest-pounding nationalist newspaper, warned in a tweet addressed to the US president.
“You help promote unity in China.”
Trump is also ridiculed on China’s heavily censored social media as “Jianguo,” which means “help build China.”
Biden’s problem
To be sure, Trump has inflicted economic and political pain on China.
“China has greatly lost its trade and technology plan,” said Beijing-based political analyst Hua Po.
In January, the US and China signed an agreement that brought a partial truce in their trade war that forced Beijing to import an additional 200 billion dollars (271.43 billion Singapore dollars) worth of American goods over two years, ranging from automobiles to machinery and from oil to agricultural products. .
Washington has also aimed its weapons at Chinese tech companies that it says pose security threats, casting future US operations of the video-sharing app TikTok owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance into uncertainty.
Mobile giant Huawei is also on Trump’s hit list.
The enmity also extends to defense and human rights, with Taiwan, Hong Kong and the treatment of China’s Uighur Muslim minority making waves in the United States.
But China may not get much relief in any of these areas if Trump loses to Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
Beijing is concerned that Biden is likely to renew US leadership on human rights, pressing China on issues of the Uighurs, Tibet and freedom in Hong Kong.
“Biden is likely to be tougher than Trump on human rights issues in Xinjiang and Tibet,” said Professor Zhu of Bucknell University.
And in technology and commerce, crucial flashpoints in the rivalry between the United States and China, it is unclear how much room a Biden White House would have to maneuver.
“Biden will inherit the tariffs and I doubt he will lift them unilaterally,” said Dr. Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Energy Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Beijing will probably have to give in to other US demands if it wants the tariffs to be lifted.”
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