Douglas H. Paal

Opinion | US-China relations: Beijing is wise to ease tensions as Donald Trump seeks an election boost

Despite months of effort, the US president has failed to get voters more focused on China’s culpability than on his administration’s mishandling of the pandemic

Beijing is not out of the woods yet, though, as Trump’s China hawks could see the next three months as their last chance to leave a legacy of severed ties

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Douglas H. Paal

Published: 3:30am, 20 Aug 2020Updated: 4:24am, 20 Aug 2020

After defying world opinion to impose the national security law on Hong Kong, Beijing has suddenly started trying to soften its international image. Politburo member Yang Jiechi and Foreign Minister Wang Yi have recently made conciliatory-sounding speeches, seemingly trying to arrest the deterioration in relations with the United States and others.

The logic behind this shifting of gears is probably complex, but an important component must be to rein in relations with Washington. As I told some scholars in China during a recent webinar, the upcoming US presidential election seems to offer both good and bad news for China. Beijing is trying to head off the bad news.

If you have trouble imagining what the good news might be, amid systematic efforts by the Trump administration to decouple the two countries, think about the US election. Despite four major speeches from cabinet-level officers, a host of executive orders and endless tweets from President Donald Trump, the American public remains focused on three major sets of issues: social disorder, the Covid-19 pandemic and the sorry state of the economy and employment. China is not high among them.

Since April, Trump and his team have tried to shift responsibility for the epidemic’s effects to China and its behaviour when the virus first appeared. Despite Trump calling it the “Chinese virus” and the “kung flu”, the American public is far more focused on his mismanagement of the pandemic and its effects at home than on Beijing’s responsibility for it. It’s quite a statement about Trump’s degree of mismanagement that efforts to stick the blame on China have failed.

This is where the bad news comes in. China has avoided moving to the top of the US election agenda partly because voters traditionally focus on domestic conditions and not foreign affairs during elections. The current triple-headed crisis will be difficult to dislodge.

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The potential for that to change and China to become a central issue cannot be discounted, though. As the Pew Research Centre reported in late July, 73 per cent of US adults say they have an unfavourable view of China, up 26 per cent since 2018. The coronavirus and its effects have combined with rising authoritarianism, trade disputes and news from Hong Kong and Xinjiang to erode opinion towards China.