It is for this reason that China has become so fundamental to Trump’s re-election strategy. In some respects the choice of China as a scapegoat might seem compelled by circumstance. Because the pandemic first began in Wuhan, Trump was naturally drawn to deflect responsibility by repeatedly referring to Covid-19 as “the China Virus,” and to proclaim that the Americans experiencing economic duress are not to blame for their own misfortune, “China is.”
But Trump’s use of China to drive an electoral narrative runs much more broadly and deeply than simple scapegoating. The intensity and variety of maneuvers undertaken by the White House in recent weeks indicate the pursuit of a much more ambitious agenda. By manipulating Sino-U.S. relations, the Trump team hopes to manufacture an issue on which they can run through November 3.
This recent campaign is in some sense an extension of the trade war with China pursued by the White House for the past three years, but it is a new edifice being built on an old foundation. A resolution of the trade war (if there is ever to be one) has effectively been deferred until after the election. Meaningful diplomacy regarding Chinese abuses in Hong Kong (where a largely peaceful movement for democracy has been met by the imposition of a draconian and illiberal “security law”) and Xinjiang (where as many as a million members of the Uighur minority have been detained in labor camps and forced to undergo “re-education”) has likewise been abandoned, all in favor of a series of escalating and gratuitous provocations, none of which is tied to discrete long-term policy goals.
The first clear signs of this campaign came in June. That month saw a staged controversy, played out in right-wing media, over whether the President’s insistence on using phrases like “Kung Flu” was racially inflammatory (it was). Since then, the White House has floated a series of confrontations with Beijing, each more aggressive than the last.
In July the administration closed the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas, on the pretext that it was engaged in espionage activities (no specific evidence or charges were announced). About nine days later Trump announced a pending ban on the Chinese social media platform TikTok and messaging service WeChat, a move that had been teased earlier in a speech by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The administration’s rationale for this move was as vague as that for the closing of the Houston consulate. The information gathered from users by TikTok and WeChat was said to pose a security threat, despite the fact that this information is no different than that gathered by platforms such as Facebook or Instagram. The most recent move in this campaign was a trip by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to Taiwan. This visit from a Cabinet-level official to Taiwan was unprecedented in the interval since formal recognition of the PRC, and was deliberately calculated to provoke CCP leaders in Beijing.
All of these provocations were aimed at eliciting a hostile and inflammatory response from Beijing. Why? What is the logic of inducing this form of artificial standoff? The perceived advantages of a “China crisis” in the current election campaign works on several levels for the Trump team.
As noted above, Trump himself is only really capable of running a form of politics derived from the reality television genre that propelled him onto the national stage. It is rooted in drama and conflict; he must show supporters that he is “vanquishing enemies” daily. From the outset his chosen antagonists were fellow Americans or residents of the US: people of color, Muslims, women, LGBTQ citizens, undocumented immigrants, Democrats.
Trump’s recent and great misfortune is that circumstance has shouldered him with an enemy that is difficult to caricature or manipulate: the Covid-19 pandemic. An effective campaign against the virus would require him to reconcile and unite groups that he had until now counted on pitting against one-another. This would require him to completely reconstruct his “brand” in a way that he lacks the will and talent to accomplish. He thus needs an enemy that will be intuitively recognizable to his base supporters, and that can produce fear and anger sufficiently intense to distract them from their fear of the Covid-19 virus.
China serves perfectly in this regard. Since his first speech about “Mexican rapists” Trump has appealed to racial animosity. He thus can rely on his most enthusiastic supporters to accept that the same information held by Facebook executives is much more dangerous when collected by Chinese corporations. If he can goad the Chinese into a sufficiently belligerent response, fear of a “yellow peril” might displace (or be conflated with) fear of the Covid-19 pandemic sufficiently to shore up support among Trump’s core followers.
Beyond this, a manufactured “China crisis” serves Trump’s political needs in other, more particular respects. Since first taking office in 2017, he has labored under the strong impression that he may have been compromised by Russia. His hostility to any investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and his extraordinary deference to Vladimir Putin at occasions such as the Helsinki summit cast suspicion on his integrity as a guardian of US national interests.
One of the most basic tactics underpinning Trump’s political success has been his playing of an “equivalency game.” In 2016 his personal corruption was a matter of public record, so by way of normalizing his candidacy and giving implicit permission to centrist voters to join his coalition, he campaigned (both on his own and through surrogates) to define Hillary Clinton as similarly corrupt. He is running the same equivalency game on Joe Biden, but in this instance (because of his own accrued liabilities) he specifically needs to undermine Biden’s timeworn reputation as a faithful steward of American interests in the realm of foreign policy.
To that end, the campaign to induce a “China crisis” is unspooling in tandem with a persistent message tying Joseph Biden and his son Hunter to corrupt dealings with the leaders in Beijing. The first hints that this was in the works appeared in October 2019, when (in the early stages of the impeachment inquiry launched by the House of Representatives) Trump told news cameras that not only should Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine be scrutinized, but that his activities in China, if investigated, would prove to be “even worse.”
The substance of these allegations remains hazy, but they have been churning through the right-wing media ecosystem for some time. Peter Schweizer, the author of the 2015 exposé Clinton Cash, has outlined charges against Hunter in his more recent publication: Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends (Harper 2019). What can be clearly ascertained is that Hunter Biden and his partners in a private equity firm set up an investment fund, Bohai Harvest RST (or BHR), that relied in part on capital provided by the Bank of China. The fund was set up after Hunter (and his daughter Finnegan, Joe Biden’s granddaughter) accompanied Joe Biden (then still Vice President) on a state visit to China in 2013.
The details of this business venture are not fully known. How much money Hunter acquired from the Bank of China, what his personal profit was from BHR’s investments, and what role Joe Biden played (if any) in brokering this deal on behalf of Hunter and his partners remain open questions. Certainly, there is at least an apparent conflict of interest. But no one has produced evidence that either Hunter or Joe Biden did anything illegal, or evenly blatantly unethical.
Lack of specifics has not deterred Trump from pressing ahead with maximalist allegations. In a recent press appearance Trump warned that, “If I don’t win the election, China will own the United States. You’re going to have to learn Chinese, you want to know the truth.” This was only one in a long series of dark hints at Joe Biden’s depth of cooptation by Beijing, a messaging strategy that is sure to intensify in frequency and stridency as November 3 approaches.
Where is all this going? Thus far the “China crisis” campaign has achieved little traction. Neither the CCP leadership in Beijing nor the Biden team have shown any inclination to take the bait. Biden has not been moved to offer more than standard arguments in defense of his foreign policy credentials.
Even more remarkably, Beijing has been extraordinarily restrained in its response to Trump’s provocations. The White House, for example, seems to have expected that its closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston would produce a response much more amenable to cable TV fireworks. If Beijing had been more obliging, it would have closed the US consular office in Hong Kong, a move that would have set off a media frenzy lasting days or even weeks. Instead Beijing closed the US consulate in Chengdu, a city that many American citizens could not find on a map, guaranteeing that the “consulate confrontation” would not provide fodder for more than a single news cycle. Similarly the proposed bans on TikTok and WeChat have elicited little by way of visible retaliation. Beijing understands what the Trump team is up to, and seems resolved not to play along.
If the Trump campaign understands the situation, there is yet no sign that their determination to follow through on the “China crisis” plan has wavered. An incumbent president who refuses to be constrained by any of the norms of foreign policy or constitutional good order has many means at his disposal, and Trump can be counted on to use them all. Beijing has vulnerabilities that can be exploited, and the White House has already shown that they are aware of these.
In particular, the trip by HHS Secretary Azar to Taiwan was an escalation into Beijing’s “red zone” of threat sensitivity. For four decades, successive US administrations have cleaved to a policy of “strategic ambiguity” calibrated to keep the peace in the Taiwan Strait. On the one hand, our posture seeks to persuade Beijing that any unprovoked military strike against Taiwan will be met with stiff resistance from the US, up to and including the use of military force. On the other hand, we have deliberately kept leaders in Taipei guessing as to how far our commitment to defend Taiwan extends, to preclude them rashly provoking the wrath of Beijing.
Such a delicate game is necessitated by the extreme volatility of the political situation in the Strait. Chinese nationalists (that is, the vast majority of the PRC’s citizens) view the inclusion of Taiwan within China’s sovereign territory as sacrosanct (even if that status is purely symbolic, as is currently the case). No Chinese government, even one that had been democratically elected, could survive the firestorm of civil unrest that would ensue in the wake of a formal Taiwanese declaration of independence. At the same time, most residents of Taiwan feel little emotional investment in the prospects of unification with the PRC. Indeed, sentiment in favor of formally declaring Taiwan an independent, democratic republic has steadily grown in recent years, a move that would certainly entail war.
The situation is explosive, and has only remained stable through the prudence and forbearance of all major international players. Enter Donald Trump, a figure for whom “prudence” and “forbearance” might as well be words exclusively spoken in some extraterrestrial tongue. He learned just how sensitive Beijing is on this issue when, before being sworn in in January 2017, he tweeted about his pleasure at receiving a phone call from “the president of Taiwan (Tsai Ing-wen),” drawing immediate and apoplectic condemnation from PRC leaders.
If Trump wants to elicit a belligerent response from Beijing (and he clearly does), he knows he only has to press against the open nerve of Taiwan. The trip by HHS Secretary Azar to Taipei is only the first foray into this tactical field. As November 3 draws nigh, the Trump White House will flirt ever more openly and perilously with recognition of Taiwanese sovereignty, until they induce a response from Beijing that rises to the level of crisis they desire.
By the same token, amplifying “awareness” of the Bidens’ corrupt ties to China is a simple matter for any president who has the will and the means to manipulate the powers of the Executive. That Trump himself is game for any degree of abuse of power is beyond doubt, and in Attorney General William Barr he clearly has a pliable instrument for the purpose of exploiting the offices of the Justice Department. As the “China crisis” heats up in late September or October, so too will a new chapter unfold in federal law enforcement’s interests in the activities of Hunter Biden and BHR. There is some slight possibility that we will get as far as October 31 without seeing Hunter’s house searched under the auspices of a “no-knock warrant” and Hunter himself “perp-walked” in handcuffs and under FBI escort, but it would be shocking if that date comes without at least the announcement of a “formal inquiry” into BHR’s alleged crimes by the Office of the Attorney General.
Nothing about Trump’s “China crisis” charade should come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to his methods since the summer of 2015. He operates exclusively at a level of public perception that he feels confident he can control, without any regard for underlying realities or long-term consequences. Unfortunately for the US, the PRC, and the world at large, the Sino-American relationship on which he is day trading is profoundly important to the long term stability and prosperity of the global community. Hopefully, in the wake of the 2020 election, the conduct of Chinese-American relations can be put back on a basis that is not purely reducible to sound-bite politics of the moment.
