The Collapse of Biden’s China Doctrine

L ast night’s call between President Biden and Xi Jinping, their second conversation since Biden took office, might foreshadow an easing of the still-hawkish U.S. policy toward China. And not because Washington succeeded in pressuring Beijing to change its ways.

Since taking office, Biden pledged to implement a strategy that blends competition and cooperation; his administration later added confrontation, where necessary, as a pillar of that doctrine. Early on in the administration, all of this amounted to a continuation of the Trump administration’s tough line, with the major exception being climate envoy John Kerry’s talks with his Chinese counterpart. But every indication from the White House about last night’s call suggests that Beijing’s tough negotiating position is rattling U.S. officials — potentially even prompting an erosion of the tough stance toward Chinese misconduct that Biden took early on in his presidency.

That can be gleaned from even the White House’s official summary of the conversation, which notes the call “was part of the United States’ ongoing effort to responsibly manage the competition between the United States and the PRC” and “the two leaders discussed the responsibility of both nations to ensure competition does not veer into conflict.”

As context, consider the hard bargain that Chinese officials are driving. During the U.S.-China summit in March, the Chinese Communist Party’s two top diplomats, Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi, took the opportunity to directly address viewers across America and the world, berating Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National-Security Adviser Jake Sullivan about what they complained was a hardline, hypocritical U.S. policy and Washington’s evaporating global sway. Meanwhile, in the months since, Chinese officials have rebuffed Defense secretary Lloyd Austin’s requests for a call to discuss limiting the potential military fallout of bilateral tensions, declined to send an appropriately high-level official to meet Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman during a visit to China in June before relenting and sending Wang, and refused to meet Kerry in person (meetings with higher-level officials took place on Zoom) during his second trip there last week.

These high-level Chinese officials, in their own summaries of these meetings, routinely complain that Washington is to blame for the downturn in bilateral relations. Continuing Trump-era policies, Biden and his team have approved arms sales to Taiwan, sanctioned Chinese officials for the crackdowns in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and pointedly criticized Chinese malfeasance in cyberspace and elsewhere. And so, the Biden administration has failed to make progress on the cooperation side of the agenda, namely concerning climate change and Afghanistan.

Xi, of course, reiterated his core complaints once again; according to the official Chinese summary of the call, he charged that the current U.S. policy toward China “has caused serious difficulties in Sino–U.S. relations” and that it “is not in the fundamental interests of the two peoples and the common interests of all countries in the world.” The truth is that Beijing’s persistent bullying campaigns targeting the world’s democracies, malign influence operations, and military buildup are to blame.

The press reports about last night’s call, which lasted about 90 minutes, cite a senior administration official who said that Biden requested the call to “test the proposition” that discussions at “the leader level will be more effective than what we have found below him.” An official told the Financial Times, “Xi has really centralized power in some pretty marked ways . . . engagement at the leader level is really what’s needed to move the ball forward.” The White House is telegraphing that it’s eager to forge ahead on fixing U.S.–China ties, even as Xi demands significant concessions to do so.

Biden officials seem to be getting nervous, and they could be embarking on a new phase of Biden’s China doctrine, one that is wholly different from the administration’s opening moves a few months ago. Then, the foreign-policy team leveraged preliminary bilateral discussions to convey the administration’s seriousness about holding the party-state to account while also probing for areas of mutual interest. The White House summary of Thursday’s call made it sound like an attempt at crisis management.

But the state of bilateral ties is only a crisis when measured against the yardstick of efforts to cooperate with China. The competitive side of Biden’s China doctrine (the sanctions, vigorous diplomacy, and rhetoric about China’s challenge to democracy) remains strong. Miles Yu, a former senior adviser to Mike Pompeo, told me the Chinese side’s tantrum at Anchorage in March stemmed from frustration that Biden kept many of Trump’s policies in place.

That agenda largely stuck precisely because it requires no Chinese buy-in. Seeking cooperation from a recalcitrant regime without softening America’s response to Xi’s repression at home and belligerence abroad was always a questionable strategy — most evidently because Chinese officials said they’d never play ball without concessions. By now, Biden’s team should have anticipated that it can either maintain the president’s commitment to defending democracy from Chinese authoritarianism or achieve diplomatic victories with Beijing, but not both.