With less than two months to go before the U.S. presidential election, foreign policy has played little role so far in the campaign between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. With specific regard to China, which a bipartisan consensus in Washington considers to be the United States’ primary global challenge today, discussion has been limited to an exchange at the recent presidential debate on the topic of trade tariffs. While we can roughly anticipate what a potential Trump second term will mean for U.S.-China relations, less is known about Harris’ positions on how to manage what many call the world’s most important bilateral relationship.
That’s in part because, if she wins in November, Harris would join both George W. Bush and Barack Obama as presidents who had not visited China prior to taking office. Moreover, her experience on China as vice president was relatively light. In all likelihood, therefore, we can expect her China policy to not significantly diverge from that crafted during the administration of President Joe Biden, at least for her initial period in office. But for a number of reasons, we might also anticipate some important nuances.
Though Biden built off of the adversarial policies introduced by Trump during his presidency, Biden also improved on that approach, making it more strategic in both content and execution. Biden’s domestic legislative agenda has provided positive support for investments in U.S. infrastructure and manufacturing that counter China’s competitive advantage in key sectors. Biden has also repaired ties with U.S. allies in Europe and Asia, especially Japan and South Korea, that had frayed under Trump, while working with the European Union, Japan and Canada on a swathe of tariffs and national security restrictions to impede China’s access to technology.