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When the world’s two most powerful men finally decided to sit down together last month, they were both coming off of major domestic victories. U.S. President Joe Biden, after corralling lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, had just signed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, the largest of its kind in decades. And Xi Jinping, certainly with less corralling, had just been enshrined by the Chinese Communist Party as one of the country’s most revered leaders, on par with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. 

But over their video call, Biden quickly eschewed any pomp and circumstance. “Next time I hope we get to do it face-to-face like we used to when we traveled through China,” President Biden said, referring to his trips to China as vice president. “We have spent an awful lot of time talking to one another, and I hope we can have a candid conversation tonight as well. Maybe I should start more formally, although you and I have never been that formal with one another.”

“I am very happy to see my old friend,” Xi responded. And with that, the two men went on to discuss the main agenda: how to diminish tensions between their two countries. It was only their third conversation since Biden took office, but they talked for three and a half hours. Senior U.S. officials kept expectations low for specific breakthroughs coming out of the meeting — they even repeatedly insisted on calling it a virtual meeting instead of a summit. But for China watchers, there was nevertheless a certain level of suspense. 

“There’s a viewpoint out there that the Biden administration has taken a lot of time — nine or so months — to get going,” says Daniel Russel, a former State Department and National Security Council (NSC) official who is now vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, about the administration’s approach to China. “What I hear a lot is, they haven’t reversed any of Donald Trump’s actions, and they even continued the denunciatory approach that Trump had, with lots of chest bumping. They launched a China review that seemed to go on forever, and then, finally, they started reaching out.” 

Although the administration has made it clear that the U.S.-China relationship is the most consequential foreign policy challenge of our time, Biden has yet to release a comprehensive China policy. His Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has said the relationship will be “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be and adversarial when it must be.” But many analysts and former officials have been left scratching their heads at how, exactly, that will translate into policy going forward, and what, exactly, the Biden administration hopes to achieve. 

It was made clear to people that this administration intended to do things differently from Trump, but they first needed to do a policy review. The question is, are we seeing the policy come to fruition now? Because if so, then I would describe their policy as a hodge podge.

Graham Webster, editor-in-chief of the Stanford-New America DigiChina Project

“Reactive, and bereft of an operating concept,” says Van Jackson, an international relations scholar at Victoria University of Wellington and former Pentagon official, about the administration’s China policy so far. “The lack of an intellectual or theoretical north star has made U.S. policy focused on renewing American industry, demonstrating American competence, and building up America’s military, but without antagonizing China. These activities all raise the question of ‘To what end?’” 

“Trump saw that it was politically advantageous to be tough on China, and Biden saw the same polls,” says John Bolton, who served as National Security Advisor during the Trump administration. “He has been rhetorically tough on China, but I can’t figure out what his policy is.”

The Xi-Biden meeting seemed like a potential turning point. Almost a full year into Biden’s term, with major domestic issues such as Covid-19 and the infrastructure bill seemingly less urgent, many observers expect China to move up from the back burner. But now, almost a month after the Xi meeting, critics say Biden’s China policy is, at best, still not ready for its debut or, at worst, not as clearly defined as it should be. 

“People have been waiting patiently for months,” says Graham Webster, editor-in-chief of the Stanford-New America DigiChina Project. “It was made clear to people that this administration intended to do things differently from Trump, but they first needed to do a policy review. The question is, are we seeing the policy come to fruition now? Because if so, then I would describe their policy as a hodge podge.” 

“Where is the policy?” asks Christopher Johnson, a former senior China analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency who now runs China Strategies Group, a political consultancy. “‘Let’s see what can be done’ seems to be the policy for now.”

From the outset, the Biden administration made two pillars of its China policy very clear. First, the administration is coordinating with like-minded allies to push back against China with moves like AUKUS, a trilateral security pact with the UK and Australia, and the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, a partnership that aims to coordinate policies on trade practices and advanced technology across the Atlantic. Second, they are working to strengthen the U.S. domestic economy and democracy. Biden even framed the infrastructure bill explicitly as an attempt to compete with China, warning that if the U.S. doesn’t take steps to invest in the domestic economy, China will “eat our lunch.” 

But while those two pillars were widely lauded, they have little to do with the U.S.’s relationship with China itself. Johnson says they amount to a “surrogate strategy.” 

“They seem to have believed that ‘domestic strengthening’ and ‘consulting with allies and partners’ could be a viable way to manage China in virtual isolation,” he says. “Those pillars are necessary but not sufficient. A country the size, scope, and impact of China simply cannot be ignored.” 

Many analysts say the Biden strategy appears to be coalescing around frameworks such as “competitive coexistence” or “durable coexistence.” Notably, this framework differs from Cold War analogies since the U.S.-Soviet Union conflict resulted in the total collapse of one country — and very few think the U.S. or China are going anywhere anytime soon. It is also distinct from other historical frameworks of ‘great power competition,’ since many of those led to hot conflict — an outcome that many observers say would be a global disaster. 

Charlene Barshefsky, the former U.S. Trade Representative who was reportedly considered for the job of ambassador to China under Biden, says she assumes the Biden administration is aiming for coexistence, “because the alternative is unthinkable.” But there are still a lot of questions, she notes, about how that coexistence will work and how it will be sustained.

“I don’t think there is a grand strategy,” she says. “At the present time, that is fine. But the administration would benefit from spelling out the end state of the U.S.-China relationship.” 

The economic dimension of the relationship seems to be particularly vexing. In a briefing after the recent Biden-Xi meeting, a senior official said that trade was not “a particularly dominant part of the conversation” — a gap that has been frustrating observers for months now. In early October, for example, Katherine Tai, the U.S. Trade Representative, delivered a speech that many expected to unveil the administration’s approach to trade, including potentially changing the tariffs from Trump’s trade war. Instead, Tai surprised some in the audience by announcing that she was keeping the tariffs in place and holding China to its commitment in the Phase 1 deal to buy more American goods by the end of this month. Given that the Chinese are only 60 percent of the way to their purchasing agreement, many are wondering what happens next. 

“One of the things that the U.S. expects of the government is certainty. Right now, I can’t predict what the tariffs will be on January 2nd, and if I am not mistaken, that is soon,” says Craig Allen, the president of the U.S.-China Business Council, a trade group. “We are at a crossroads.” 

‘THE NEW NORMAL’

Biden’s conviviality with Xi stems from a trip the two men took together to Chengdu in 2011. There, with no formal agenda and only a small group of their close aides, Biden and Xi ate meals, visited schools, watched basketball games, and chatted together.

“They grew comfortable talking to each other, and probed each other’s world views,” says Russel, who was on the trip with Biden as the NSC’s senior director for Asian Affairs. “Biden is really good at this — he is a diamond caliber schmoozer. And he certainly felt like he had the ability to directly communicate with Xi and speak pretty candidly.”

While the trip had been designed by the Obama administration as a way to gain insight into the man who was slated to become China’s next leader, no one knew at the time that Biden too would ascend to the top of the political pyramid. The time the two men spent together, both in Chengdu and on later trips, could be seen as a major political asset, but a lot has changed in the decade since — including Biden’s ability to communicate directly with Xi. 

With China’s behavior on the world stage turning markedly more aggressive, U.S. policy was transformed by the hardline stance of the Trump administration, which enacted sanctions on Chinese officials and firms, launched a trade war, and took the step of labelling China’s oppression of the Uyghur minority a genocide. The outbreak of Covid-19 and the Chinese government’s less-than-transparent response further exacerbated China’s bad reputation: 76 percent of Americans, according to a recent public opinion poll, have an unfavorable view of China. 

As a result, Washington insiders say the politics of China has become an increasingly bipartisan issue. 

“Xi Jinping accomplished what no one else can: united Republicans and Democrats in Congress to be very hawkish on China,” says Anja Manuel, a former State Department official who now directs the Aspen Strategy Group. “One member of Congress told me that a guaranteed campaign applause line is to say something tough on China. That might be politically expedient, but all this belligerence from Congress means the Executive Branch has less ability to turn down the temperature if needed. It could slide into something we don’t want.”

“The danger in Washington,” notes Joseph Nye, a scholar at Harvard University and former Defense official, “is that political competition makes Democrats and Republicans say, ‘We are tougher than you are on China.’ Domestic politics can get in the way of strategic calculation.”

Nye doesn’t think the Biden administration has fallen into this trap, but says that Biden’s trade policy provides a particularly potent example of the administration’s political bind: even though many view the inherited tariffs on Chinese goods as ineffective and ultimately costly to Americans, removing them would open the administration up to attacks as being “soft” on China. “Biden is not going to spend his political capital on a new trade bill until he gets his domestic political agenda passed,” says Nye. 

To many insiders, however, such political calculations and delays are all the more frustrating since Biden, the foreign policy veteran, has had an experienced and outspoken China team on his staff from the outset. Starting in 2018 with a piece entitled “The China Reckoning,” Foreign Affairs published a series of influential articles on China policy by Kurt Campbell, Ely Ratner, Jake Sullivan and Rush Doshi — all of whom are now key members of the Biden administration and spread out across the White House and Defense Department. Taken together, the articles lay out a clear-eyed approach to competition with China, prioritizing allies and domestic renewal instead of attempts to change China’s course, which the authors argue largely failed in the past. In May, Campbell, who is now the Asia policy czar at the NSC, said decisively, “The period that was broadly described as engagement has come to an end.”

With a united China team in the administration combined with a bipartisan consensus around the importance of the U.S.-China relationship, many observers expected immediate and decisive articulation of a new China policy. But, for Biden, the innumerable domestic challenges — highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic and racial equality demonstrations — have taken precedence. 

As Drew Thompson, a former Pentagon official focused on China who is now a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore, says, “Coming up with a China policy seems to be a lower order issue. The folks who are working on the China piece — like Campbell and Ratner — they probably know what they want to do. But it is still unclear what Biden’s end game is. Every time he mentions Xi in public, he mentions how many hours he has spent with him in the past. That’s great, but it doesn’t give us any insight into what he wants out of the U.S.-China relationship.” 

Devoid of that clarity, some say Biden is opening himself up for interpretation — and it’s not favorable. 

“Criticism of his China policy is quite rampant,” says Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center. “The hawks think his policy is not hawkish enough and the doves think it is not dovish enough. He is trying to navigate between, and it is leaving everyone unhappy.”

The hawks think [Biden’s] policy is not hawkish enough and the doves think it is not dovish enough. He is trying to navigate between, and it is leaving everyone unhappy.

Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center

Including, it seems, the Chinese. Many observers say that Chinese officials expected Biden to revert from the Trump era’s aggressive tenor to the more conciliatory approach of the Obama administration. While they waited for that transformation to occur, nothing got done.

“For the first eight months, the Chinese just refused to engage,” says Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “They hoped that there would be a return to Obama-era policies.” In the first high-level engagements between the two countries in Anchorage in March and Tianjin in July, Glaser says there was plenty of grandstanding but little in the way of progress: “That delay has been a hindrance, and just now they are settling into the recognition that this is the new normal.” 

The new normal, unfortunately for all sides, not only includes a politically-restrained Biden, but also Covid-19 travel restrictions, which observers say have been especially hard on the relationship. Xi has isolated himself, both politically and physically, by not leaving China for nearly two years, and many of the informal dialogues between academics, former officials, and business people have been constrained by the pandemic. China’s increasing isolation, in combination with the overwhelming consensus in the U.S. that engaging with China fails to yield results, has transformed the relationship beyond the scope of two old friends sitting down for a chat.

“Many of the normal channels of communication are broken,” says Manuel. “​​When you put those two things — D.C. hawkishness and China not wanting to talk — together, it’s very hard to find compromise.”

BIDEN’S BALANCING ACT

Just as the sun was setting on a Sunday evening in Washington, a small group of activists were huddled outside the White House gates holding warm beverages and hopping between feet to stay warm. They had been camped there since the night before, and they would stay until the next evening when Biden spoke to Xi. 

Their goal, clearly expressed in the flag draped over the metal barrier, was simple: “Biden: Tell Xi Human Rights Matter.” The group, which was made up of Tibetan, Hong Kong, and Uyghur activists, released a list of demands, including encouraging Xi to release political prisoners held in China, to press Beijing to repeal the National Security Law in Hong Kong, and to allow companies access to audit their supply chains in Xinjiang. 

Tenzin Yangzom, a young Tibetan activist who helped organize the protest, told The Wire, “We want him to live up to his promises in the campaign. He hasn’t done a good job of prioritizing these issues. But we are optimistic he will; we wouldn’t be out here if we didn’t think there was a chance.”

The Biden administration has spoken out about many human rights issues in China. In his Senate confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Blinken surprised many by reaffirming the Trump administration’s characterization of China’s mass detention and oppression of Uyghurs as genocide. The Biden administration has also decried the “significant erosion” of Hong Kongers’ rights and freedoms after the passage of the National Security Law. And last month, after Peng Shuai, a 35-year-old Chinese tennis star, accused a former vice premier of sexually assaulting her in a detailed Weibo post and, subsequently, was not seen in public for weeks, Biden said he is “considering” a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics this winter due to China’s human rights abuses. 

According to the official readout of the Biden-Xi meeting, Biden “raised concerns about the PRC’s practices in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, as well as human rights more broadly.” But Yangzom, the activist, was not satisfied. “Biden’s words need to be backed with tangible actions that will actively challenge Xi and the CCP’s human rights violations,” she says.

Herein lies one of the most intransigent problems for Biden. As Ali Wyne, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group, notes, “The U.S. can’t be the U.S. without advocating against human rights abuses. There is a certain obligation to spotlight abuses.” And yet, given how interconnected the U.S. and Chinese economies are, more meaningful actions to change Beijing’s behavior — such as, say, the kind of widespread sanctions and boycotts that the U.S. imposed on South Africa during apartheid — would likely be impossible. 

We hope that the national security lane is as narrow as possible, so that the commercial lane is as wide as possible.

Alan Beebe, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China

Just a few blocks away from the vigil outside the White House, for instance, the U.S.-China Business Council (USCBC) was advocating for an entirely different set of priorities. On the Friday before the Biden-Xi meeting, USCBC, along with 23 other major business groups, released a letter urging the administration to advance a “more comprehensive and durable trade and economic strategy.” The letter recommended the U.S. work with China to fully implement the Phase 1 trade agreement, engage on structural issues like state-directed economic policies, and reduce tariffs. 

More broadly, the business community hopes that in a relationship increasingly framed as a military and security challenge, there is still room for commerce. As Alan Beebe, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, says, “We hope that the national security lane is as narrow as possible, so that the commercial lane is as wide as possible.”

The administration shows no signs of widening the commercial lane with China anytime soon, but it does seem to be focusing on economic relationships with allies in Asia. Last month, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and US Trade Representative Katherine Tai traveled to Asia together to meet with allies in the Indo-Pacific region such as Japan, Australia, and Singapore. These countries, among others, are signatories of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a trade pact originally called TPP and designed by the Obama administration to counter China. In the 2016 election, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Trump all came out against the deal, and when Trump came into office, he withdrew from the agreement — citing the deal’s lack of benefits to American workers. The Biden administration has been unwilling to re-join it mostly due to opposition from labor groups, who argue that the deal decreases wages and lowers environmental and workplace standards. 

The goal of Raimondo and Tai’s trip was to lay the groundwork for a new economic framework, expected to be announced next year, that would allow the U.S. to more easily engage with the region without joining any regional agreements — a tricky play, especially now that China has applied to join the CPTPP.

“It is like having Thanksgiving dinner without turkey, just cranberry sauce and stuffing,” says Michael J. Green, former NSC senior director for Asia under Bush and now a senior vice president for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, of the strategy. “The reaction among our allies is: This is nice, but not enough. Meanwhile, China is going in offering a steak. The lack of economic statecraft remains a major Achilles heel.”

Despite this, Green says the Biden administration still has more of a China strategy now than there was under Trump or Obama. Given the complexity of balancing all these competing priorities — from economic to human rights to national security — others note the administration’s strategy so far has been adept since it seems to be pursuing those areas that end up having the highest potential for positive outcomes. “The policy is largely iterative,” Barshefsky says. “I think the Chinese saying, ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones,’ is an accurate description.” 

Attempting to chart a new course in a relationship with few historical precedents is also worthy of credit, says Glaser. “The administration is trying to recast the relationship,” she says. “It sees it as a fundamentally new relationship between the U.S. and China, so it is trying to reject past frameworks. It won’t be achieved overnight.”

Or, as Jacob Stokes, a fellow at Center for New American Security (CNAS) who worked on Biden’s national security staff when he was vice president, put it, “They are trying to rebuild the plane while flying it.” 

But critics say such an attempt risks losing sight of the horizon. Susan Thornton, the former acting assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, recently wrote in the New York Times, “The difficulty in setting clear priorities ultimately could be Mr. Biden’s undoing. If everything is a priority, then nothing is, and leverage dissipates across an ever-shifting list of urgent issues.”

“Team Biden has been so busy ‘rivalry-ing’ — they would say ‘competing’ — with China that they haven’t spent the time to actually think about what they want it to look like and what we have to do to get there,” says Johnson, from the China Strategies Group. “They have to have an honest assessment of China’s global ambitions and — this is the hard bit — decide which we can accept and which we can not.” 

‘PLAYING WITH FIRE’

At the moment, Taiwan is quickly emerging as the flashpoint for deciding how much of China’s global ambitions the U.S. will accept. China has been ramping up military exercises near Taiwan, and the U.S. has, in turn, increased support of Taiwan with diplomatic engagement and weapon sales. According to the Biden-Xi meeting readout, Biden underscored that the U.S. “strongly opposes unilateral efforts to change the status quo or undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.” And Xi said that the U.S.’s support of Taiwan amounts to “playing with fire.”

Adding further complication to the delicate issue, Biden, who is notorious for his flubs, has made three mistakes in recent months when referencing Taiwan. At a town hall event in October, for example, he was asked whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan if they were attacked by China. “Yes, we have a commitment to do that,” he responded, even though the U.S. policy is “strategic ambiguity,” which deliberately leaves the answer to that question unclear. Biden made a similar statement in August during an ABC News interview. Then, the day after the Biden-Xi meeting, Biden referred to Taiwan as “independent” — even though the U.S. officially affirms the “One China” policy, which does not recognize Taiwan as separate from China. All three times, the White House was forced to release statements saying that his comments did not reflect a change in policy. 

“Fool me once, but it keeps happening,” says Taylor Fravel, a political science professor and expert on the Chinese military at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Biden clearly hasn’t been sufficiently briefed on how to talk about this. And that is a problem. Even if the Chinese understand they are flubs, it is not clear that the Chinese public will understand that. That would put pressure on the Chinese government. And if it keeps happening, Beijing would have to ask, is this what he really thinks?” 

On the Taiwan issue in particular, observers say communication is paramount, especially now that Xi has centralized the power structure around himself. During the virtual meeting, Biden, according to the readout, underscored the importance of maintaining open “lines of communication.” But the question is if it will trickle down enough to lower the temperature and prevent minor skirmishes from turning into full-blown conflicts — such as in 2001, when an American EP-3 plane collided with a Chinese jet and both sides worked to defuse the diplomatic crisis. 

“There has not been enough communication,” says Andy Rothman, investment strategist at Matthews Asia and former State Department official focused on China. “I am not talking about formal dialogues; I am talking about back-and-forth informal communications that build up relationships and trust even when they disagree. If there is an accident somewhere, would they be able to resolve it?”

Ensuring that tension doesn’t slip into military conflict is surely on Biden’s mind — Campbell and Sullivan even co-wrote a 2019 article entitled “Competition Without Catastrophe” — but observers note the pressures of domestic politics, such as the fear of being seen as “soft” on China, can be dangerously compounding.

“Politics is a major, major constraint on the relationship,” says Jackson, of Victoria University of Wellington. “Politics all but ensures that the U.S. can pursue no consistent throughline on China except for militancy.”

Harvard’s Nye says he worries most about “sleepwalkers syndrome.” “That term comes from World War I,” he says. “None of the powers in World War I wanted a war, yet they blundered into it. We have to make sure we don’t sleepwalk into a war with China.”

Even short of war, however, this atmosphere of tension can have negative effects. Yangyang Cheng, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, worries about the U.S. public’s opinion of China. “China has become this amorphous threat in the U.S. consciousness — where the U.S. can project all American insecurities,” she says. “That has immediate consequences, both domestically with people who look Chinese on the street getting harassed or being targeted if they are scientists and researchers. And internationally, it decreases the chance of useful collaboration on issues like the pandemic or climate change.”

Climate change is often held up as the one area where collaboration is still possible. Indeed, John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, has made it his priority. But the viability of this approach very much depends on who you talk to. Many view the recent joint statement at the United Nations climate conference, pledging to work together on environmental solutions, as a positive sign, for instance. 

“The climate agreement was a major indicator that both sides would pursue successes,” says Paul Heer, a former China analyst at the CIA who is now a fellow at the Center for the National Interest. “There has been an incremental recognition on both sides that steps need to be taken.” 

But others note that the joint statement didn’t contain any new pledges or details, making it indicative of how much more work remains to be done.

“It is positive as far as it goes,” says CNAS’s Stokes. “But it is also a statement of intentions with no enforcement mechanism. Like so many other areas of the relationship, the proof will be in the pudding.”

After their three-and-a-half hour meeting, for instance, Biden and Xi agreed to talk about nuclear arsenals in response to concerns about China’s hypersonic missile technology. But the only concrete outcomes were a deal on journalist access and, in the lead up to the meeting, a move to mutually release citizens held in the U.S. and China. “It was positive in that it wasn’t negative,” notes MIT’s Fravel. 

If you are arriving on earth as an alien and about to take over, which would you choose? Would you rather become the leader of the U.S. or China? Do the math on the strengths, the values and the resources.

Then Vice President Joe Biden, to Daniel Russel, 2011

But this might end up being enough for Biden — despite calls from his critics for a more explicit China policy. According to Daniel Russel, who accompanied the then-vice president on the 2011 trip to China, the most important principle guiding Biden’s approach to China is his deep and dogged conviction that America is stronger, more resilient, and more capable than China. Russel remembers Biden turning to him on the plane home and acknowledging that China was certainly a force to be reckoned with. But, as Russel describes it, Biden then asked him, “If you are arriving on earth as an alien and about to take over, which would you choose? Would you rather become the leader of the U.S. or China? Do the math on the strengths, the values and the resources.” 

Today, with the infrastructure bill passed, Biden’s next major domestic hurdle is his signature social spending package, Build Back Better, which aims to strengthen the middle class but faces an uncertain future in the Senate. In other words, in lieu of an ambitious bilateral policy with China, Biden’s more immediate concern is finding a way to make sure the math on America still adds up.

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