In China, Trump has caché but few see U.S. ties improving under him or Harris

BEIJING — The day after President Biden announced that he was not seeking reelection, a newspaper in China conducted an informal poll online, asking: Who do you think can win, former President Donald Trump or Vice President Harris?

The result was a landslide for Trump, with nearly 80% of the 22,000 votes cast.

But for the Chinese government, it's not so clear cut.

The former president's name does have caché in China — there's a real estate firm bearing the Trump name, a toilet company called Trump, even a made-in-China car called the Trumpchi. After the July 13 assassination attempt against Trump, there was an outpouring on Chinese social media praising him for being tough. And he's been in the public eye for years.

People like 27-year-old Hugo Chen got exposed early — in his case, through a teacher who thought watching Trump's reality TV show The Apprentice was a good way to learn English.

"In primary school, probably fourth or fifth [grade], our teacher played this show to us," Chen says.

"I thought Donald Trump was really aggressive, very strong-minded, also very rich, for sure. And during the show I thought Donald Trump himself was a very solid image of the American dream," he says.

But he says if he could vote in the United States, he wouldn't pick either — because they're both bad for China.

After Trump was elected, optimism in Beijing that he might be somebody with whom China could cut deals quickly faded. Trump launched a trade war in 2018 and his policy toward Beijing hardened after COVID-19 emerged.

When Biden took office, the Chinese government said it hoped relations would soon get back on “the right track," only to be disappointed again.

Now, facing four years of Trump or Harris in the Oval Office, hope has given way to resignation in Beijing.

Zha Daojiong, an international relations expert at Peking University, says there isn’t much daylight between the Republicans and Democrats on China.

"They’ve been trying to outshine each other to be tough on China," he says.

"It’s hard to imagine what may change in ... [less than] four months to come before the election — or after."

Trump has suggested he would amp up the trade war and impose tariffs of 60-100% on every Chinese import to the U.S.

His selection of Sen. JD Vance as a running mate may also be bad news for China, according to Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University.

"Trump is an economic nationalist and a protectionist, and his main consideration when it comes to China policy is economic," Wu says.

"I'm worried that Vance might be a national security hawk. If that's the case, he may advocate for increased military and geopolitical confrontation with China, especially on the Taiwan issue."

On Taiwan, Trump has declined repeatedly to commit to defending the island against China — and in a recent Bloomberg Businessweek interview, he questioned why the U.S. should do so, saying "Taiwan should pay us for defense."

Vance, on the other hand, said in a speech last year it's in the United States' interests to prevent a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in order to protect its microchip industry, which is critical to the U.S. economy. [[VANCE NOTORIOUSLY HAS CHANGED TUNE, SO SEEMS BETTER TO BE SPECIFIC WHEN/WHERE HE SAID WHAT AS YOU'VE DONE WITH OTHER QUOTES. I DUG UP A LINK TO THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION SPEECH I THINK BLOOMBERG WAS REFERRING TO. DOES THIS WORK?]]

President Biden has been tough, too.

He has kept Trump's tariffs in place, sanctioned Chinese officials for alleged human rights abuses, penalized Chinese companies for supporting Russia’s war machine, rallied allies and sought to block Chinese access to cutting-edge technologies, including key microchips.

"When I came to office, the conventional wisdom was that China would inevitably surpass the United States. That’s not the case anymore," he said in an Oval Office address on July 24.

Harris appears to be in lock step on China.

"China is undermining key elements of the international rules-based order. China has challenged the freedom of the seas. China has flexed its military and economic might to coerce and intimidate its neighbors," she said in 2022 while visiting a U.S. Navy ship in Japan.

Chinese policy analysts say the trend lines are not good — regardless of who the next U.S. president is.

“If we continue the current trajectory I think we are gradually moving towards another crisis or some kind of confrontation,” Da Wei, an expert on China-U.S. relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing, told an international forum this month. “We need to think about what we should do, what we can do, after January, no matter who wins the election."

But the options for Beijing seem limited.

The Chinese government has so far shown restraint when it comes to rhetoric on the election.

When Trump escaped an assassination attempt earlier this month, Chinese leader Xi Jinping sent his sympathies. When Vance dubbed China America's "biggest threat," the Foreign Ministry said it opposed China being used as an issue in the U.S. election. And when Biden announced he was stepping aside, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson declined to comment, noting that the election was an internal affair of the United States.

"I think the bottom line thinking, or position, is very much like what Lyndon Johnson said to his Cabinet back when we were busy with the Cultural Revolution," says Zha, of Peking University. "Let’s just not say anything or do anything and then see what happens."

There’s almost no upside to weighing in, and plenty of potential downside, he says.

And ultimately, he says, the winner of the U.S. election may not have much room to maneuver on China policy anyway.

"The space for alternative proposals on both sides is limited, to say the best, but perhaps you can say [it's] virtually nonexistent," Zha says. "So this is going to be very challenging."