Opinion | Can ‘Beijing Biden’ balance being tough on China while seeking common ground?

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee in the US presidential election, continues to lead President Donald Trump in the polls, but in key areas of foreign policy it is still unclear how he would govern. He has, for example, yet to outline how he would handle the country’s most demanding foreign policy challenge: how to interact with China.

As should be expected in an election year, the platform aims to distinguish the Democrats from the Trump administration, which has taken a single direction throughout its tenure: pursuing economic and diplomatic decoupling to reduce reliance on China and curtail its economic and geopolitical expansion.

Through trade wars, putting pressure on allies to reject Chinese companies in 5G infrastructure and, more recently, sanctioning Chinese officials over policy in Xinjiang, the administration has exerted multiple lines of pressure on Beijing.

At the same time, the United States is now more militarily active in key regional hotspots such as the South China Sea, keen to be seen supporting allies and pushing back on perceived Chinese coercion.

According to the recently released platform, the Democrats, by contrast, would not “resort to self-defeating, unilateral tariff wars” or fall “into the trap of a new Cold War”.