On Tuesday, 19 January, less than 48 hours of Joe Biden assuming office as the 46th President of the United States, outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement on China’s record of persecuting Uyghur Muslims in the harshest possible terms. He referred to Nazi Germany and equated the treatment of Uyghurs by the Communist Party and Xi Jinping as “genocide”. The statement ended with the assertion, “We will not remain silent. If the Chinese Communist Party is allowed to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against its own people, imagine what it will be emboldened to do to the free world, in the not-so-distant future.” Significantly, Antony Blinken, who is Biden’s choice for Secretary of State, echoed Pompeo, when at his Senate confirmation hearing on the same day, he was asked if using the term genocide was correct. “That would be my judgement as well,” he replied. “Forcing men, women and children into concentration camps, trying to in effect re-educate them to be adherents to the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, all of that speaks to an effort to commit genocide,” he added. Blinken also said that “…President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China… I disagree very much with the way that he went about it in a number of areas, but the basic principle was the right one, and I think that’s actually helpful to our foreign policy.” Blinken went on to talk about Hong Kong, where “democracy is being trampled”, and how the US under Donald Trump should have acted sooner on the matter.
In fact, China was the dominant theme in other confirmation hearings as well on Tuesday. Avril Haines, who is Biden’s choice for director of national intelligence, said that countering the threat from China would be her top priority; while Biden’s choice for Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen was equally categorical. “We need to take on China’s abusive, unfair and illegal practices…we’re prepared to use the full array of tools” for this purpose, Yellen said. She also flagged China’s “horrendous human rights abuses”, apart from accusing China of “undercutting American companies” by providing illegal subsidies, by dumping products and by stealing intellectual property. In other words, the tone has been set for President Joe Biden’s China policy. It is going to be as hard line as Donald Trump’s, minus the “spectacle”, the drama, the confusion and the incessant flow of tweets that had become synonymous with the Trump presidency. There will be continuity in foreign policy.
These statements coming from Biden’s Cabinet picks will be music to the ears of those who were apprehensive that the Biden administration would revert to Barack Obama’s—and in general Democratic—policy of humouring China in the hope that it would be integrated into the rules-based political and economic global mainstream and become open and democratic. Blinded by this belief, Obama did not lift a finger when China illegally grabbed the Scarborough shoal in 2012. He thus left all US allies in the South China Sea disillusioned and helped China entrench itself in that region. The worry was that Biden, being an Atlanticist, would stay focused solely on Russia, when it is China that is the clear and present danger, with Moscow at best an appendage of Beijing. India, in particular, can expect that there will be continuity in US’ Indo-Pacific strategy as well under President Biden, for the centre of gravity of geopolitics has shifted to the Indo-Pacific and the primary goal of the free world should be to ensure that China is unable to remake the international order with Chinese characteristics.
The sound-bites coming from Washington will not be music to China’s ears, considering Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi has been vocalizing Beijing’s hope for “a smooth transition in China-US relations” post Trump. But then perhaps Mr Yi has forgotten the tiny detail about the Wuhan virus that his government has unleashed on the world—the virus that infected around 2.4 million people and counting, in US alone, apart from killing nearly 400,000 people in that country. The world will find it difficult to forgive Xi Jinping for this genocide and US is no exception.
In this context, mention must be made of the strange role that the European Union is playing in all this—scurrying to cut business deals with China. It’s as if the virus did not happen; as if there is no need to seek accountability from China for crippling the world economy and for killing over 2 million people; it is as if democracy has not been killed in Hong Kong or Uyghurs have not been sent to concentration camps; it is as if China is not a malevolent power. It is as if security/sovereignty and trade can exist in silos. Driven by domestic economic compulsions, EU seems to have calculated that the US is a spent force and China’s time has come. Hence, President Biden has his job cut out: to reclaim the global primacy that the US is perceived to have lost to China. For that, he first needs to convince his EU allies—a part of the “free world” with which he hopes to counter China—that a world with Chinese characteristics will not be a pretty one.