China hawks latch on to Trump’s campaign against Beijing

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When US secretary of state Mike Pompeo last month declared in a speech that China was intent on “hegemony”, it was yet another sign of how much has changed since Donald Trump wrote in a tweet in March about his “respect” for President Xi Jinping.

As the pandemic has devastated the US economy, imperilling his re-election, Mr Trump has ditched his reluctance to taking a harsher stance on Beijing, as he increasingly blames the Chinese government for what he calls the “China virus”. 

His decision to make China a bogeyman in the 2020 US presidential race has opened the door for security hawks to push policies to clamp down on threats from Beijing that Mr Trump previously ignored. But some officials privately say that they are also racing to enact tough policies in case Mr Trump ends up losing to Joe Biden in November.

“While Trump and his campaign team are using China to boost his re-election chances, senior administration officials have other goals,” said Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They appear to want to lock in strategic, system rivalry with China so that if Biden is elected it can’t be reversed.”

The pace has been staggering. Last week alone, Mr Trump imposed sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials over the draconian security law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong, crafted proposals that could result in the delisting of Chinese companies from US stock exchanges and gave US companies 45 days to stop dealing with ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, and WeChat, a Chinese messaging app.

Recently Mr Trump has imposed sanctions on Chinese officials over human rights abuses in Tibet and Xinjiang, toughened his stance on the South China Sea, forced a government pension fund not to invest in Chinese stocks and shut the Chinese consulate in Houston over spying claims. He has also convinced allies not use Huawei gear in 5G networks. 

The deluge has surprised many people. Only last summer, Mr Trump told Mr Xi that he would not criticise China’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. John Bolton, his former national security adviser, said in his memoir that Mr Trump also gave Mr Xi the green light to detain 1m Muslim Uighurs in camps in Xinjiang.

“It has become increasingly clear that this startling barrage of actions on China is driven by a coterie of China hawks who fear Trump’s loss in November and are seeking to bind the next president’s China policy,” said Evan Medeiros, a former top White House aide to Barack Obama.

Mr Trump was reluctant to punish China last year as he negotiated a trade agreement. While some of that resistance eased after he struck a deal in January, one senior US official said the main driver of his shift was his anger over the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s partly that the president really understands at this point the different threats from China and sees an opportunity to drive significant change,” said the official, who stressed that he was furious when told that China held back information. “That really got to the president. He has taken a lot of political damage because of Covid.”

In his speech last month, Mr Pompeo said Mr Trump had decided “enough” when it came to China. Mr Pompeo is one of the most hawkish officials on China, alongside Robert O’Brien, national security adviser, and his deputy Matt Pottinger — a trio that Chris Johnson, a former top China analyst at the CIA, has dubbed “POP”.

“The president is totally embroiled in the Covid-19 debacle and seemingly losing the election without even trying. It leaves a lot of room for ‘POP’ to whisper in his ear at convenient times,” said Mr Johnson.

Mr Trump’s China team is “badly fractured”, according to Mr Bolton, running the gamut from hawks such as commerce secretary Wilbur Ross to “panda huggers” such as Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin.

Over time, Larry Kudlow, White House economic adviser, and Robert Lighthizer, US trade representative, have grown increasingly hawkish, the senior US official said.

“Mnuchin has not changed,” the official said. “There are just more people on the other side now.”

Kurt Tong, who served as US consul general in Hong Kong until last year, said it was odd there was not more debate inside the administration given the importance of the US-China relationship.

“Long-term civilian and military professionals are not driving it. It even seems like a lot of these decisions are not actually involving the president,” Mr Tong said. 

Julia Friedlander, a sanctions expert who served in the National Security Council and Treasury during the Trump administration, said some of the timing was coincidental — the result of internal processes with defined timelines. But now, “you’re seeing every agency firing on all cylinders”, she noted.

The intensity of actions has sparked speculation that Mr Trump could go even further before the election, including potentially imposing sanctions on a Chinese bank. But while the administration has made many moves that seem aggressive, Mr Johnson said, some are not as tough as they first appear.

“The Hong Kong sanctions were a damp squib because they just targeted the hapless executioners in Hong Kong,” he said. “There are still some red lines, such as sanctions on Politburo Standing Committee members Wang Yang or Han Zheng, or broad brush financial sanctions on banks that the hawks would certainly like to see.”

Ultimately, Mr Biden could overturn any of the actions that were enacted by executive order. But the official stressed it was better to proceed with the orders even with potential for reversal: “It’s a lot easier to maintain status quo.” 

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