Stephen Roach

Opinion | Why is China missing from US presidential election debate?

It is worrying that candidates and voters have little interest in probing the US’ most consequential foreign policy issue of the century

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A Chinese flag flies behind barbed wire at the Chinese Consulate General in San Francisco in July 2020. Photo: AFP

Stephen Roach

Published: 8:30pm, 26 Sep 2024

Other than a few glib remarks, surprisingly little was said about China at this month’s US presidential debate. Former president Donald Trump asserted that his proposed import tariffs would punish “China and all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years”. Vice-President Kamala Harris, for her part, disparaged China’s pandemic response, stating that President Xi Jinping “was responsible for lacking and not giving us transparency about the origins of Covid”.

The failure to focus on China was in one sense predictable. US voters have been largely fixated on other anxieties during this election cycle: abortion and women’s reproductive rights, immigration and border security, and inflation and pocketbook issues.

The moderators and their preselected line of questioning did little to probe what could well be America’s most consequential foreign policy issue of the 21st century, even though the Commission on the National Defense Strategy and the White House’s National Security Strategy have elevated China risks to near existential status. A failure to address this issue made no sense.

China has invariably been an important topic of discussion in past campaigns, starting with the October 1960 debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, which featured an extended back and forth over the disputed islands of Quemoy (Kinmen) and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait.

Almost all subsequent presidential debates, including the three encounters between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, have included exchanges on Sino-American relations. (Trump’s constant references to “Chai-nah” that year were even the subject of a viral video.) Is the American electorate so overwhelmed by polarised social media discourse and the 24-hour news cycle that it has lost its appetite for substantive policy discussions?

Of course, both parties’ agreement on the severity of the China threat may also explain their inclination to ignore it. Moreover, given the tendency of US politicians to blame others for problems of their own making, the shared scapegoating of China is hardly surprising.