On Joe Biden’s first day in office, the People’s Republic of China decided to settle scores individually with people who worked in the Trump administration by announcing that 28 members of the outgoing administration would be personally sanctioned for “crazy moves which have gravely interfered in China’s internal affairs,” primarily meaning that the Trump administration called out ongoing Chinese Communist Party human-rights abuses such as genocide, concentration camps, and slavery:
Jimmy Quinn, National Review’s resident expert on the China beat, wrote that these sanctions are “largely symbolic” because most of these people are unlikely to travel to China in private life, and because members of Congress subject to similar sanctions “mostly took that as a badge of honor,” and they will, too. I’m not so sure we should be quite that sanguine. Biden will almost certainly do nothing for these people, guaranteeing that the next Republican administration will have little incentive to do anything for Biden officials who are personally targeted by the PRC. And despite early indications of the Biden team’s willingness to carry on some aspects of Trump’s confrontational stance against China, it is far from clear that there will be retaliation of a nature that would deter China from repeating this tactic in the future.
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