City Beat | Will a Biden presidency give Hong Kong a break, or is it the other way round?
- Whether Joe Biden adopts a harder or softer approach to China, or maintains the status quo, it’s not going to matter much to how Beijing calibrates its Hong Kong policy
- But, just as China has taken to weighing public opinion in Hong Kong and on the mainland, Biden will also take domestic American politics into consideration for policymaking
Now that Joe Biden is set to take over from Donald Trump as US president, although the latter has yet to officially concede he lost the election, the big question in this part of the world is what comes next for Sino-American relations.
Will a Biden presidency ease China-US tensions and eventually benefit Hong Kong by halting new sanctions, if not lifting some of those already in force?
Not really. Whether it’s Biden or Trump in the White House, the future course of this special administrative region of China is more for Beijing to set now, since the top leadership does not care much about how the US reacts to how it governs this defiant city.
The unfolding of the US election drama has drawn mixed feelings, with many mainland Chinese citizens and Hongkongers wanting to see Trump re-elected – although for contradictory reasons.
Across the border, besides the group of gongzhi, or “public intellectuals” who pinned their hopes on Trump to push for China’s democracy or political reform, which was not quite the case, the general public were more inclined to count on Trump’s “impulsive” behaviour, especially given America’s escalating coronavirus crisis, to enable a sense of unity among the Chinese. Trump unintentionally won himself a household nickname as “Comrade Chuan Jianguo”, or someone helping to build the nation of China.
