To say the first Trump term was eventful with regard to US-China relations would be a gross understatement. A multi-year trade war, shuttered consulates, military posturing in the South China Sea, and recriminations abound – the tone set by the last four years has been eerily reminiscent of the Cold War, culminating in a July speech where Secretary Pompeo warned “if the free world doesn’t change, communist China will surely change us.” The negative trend has been further encouraged by developments in China, where an unconstrained Xi Jinping has cracked down on Hong Kong civil society and presided over the construction a network of concentration camps in Xinjiang and evidently Tibet as well.

Will the downward spiral in US-China relations be reversed, or is this one diplomatic relationship that even the ‘back-to-normal’ candidate won’t be able to fix?

Analysis

China is one arena where President Trump’s policies are likely to outlive his presidency, in spirit if not form. This is because there have been sweeping changes on both sides of the Pacific over the past five years, and these changes are likely to persist, constraining the options of future US presidents.

For one, negative perceptions of China have proliferated in the United States during the COVID-19 era. Pew polling earlier in the year found that over two-thirds of Americans held an ‘unfavorable’ perception of the country, the worst rating since polling began in 2005. In the most recent polls which asked about President Xi specifically, the trend is even clearer, with 77% of respondents showing no confidence that the Chinese leader would ‘do the right thing’ in global affairs (up steeply from 50% in 2019). These negative perceptions are broadly in response to Beijing’s human rights record in Hong Kong and Xinjiang; its ongoing militarization of the South China Sea, and the apparent cover-up of China’s initial COVID-19 outbreak. And they are not restricted to the United States; rather, there’s a general negative trend that’s evident throughout the democratic world, with the United States, Italy, Germany, and Australia seeing the biggest dips in faith in Xi Jinping over the past year.

One detail of note here is that US perceptions do not seem to be guided by President Trump’s preferred protectionist narratives which tend to portray China as rule-breaker and schemer par excellence in international trade. If there’s one relatively bright spot for the bilateral relationship’s future prospects, it’s that the American public’s views on free trade have recovered from the low point of 2016. And voting blocs that felt the worst effects of China’s retaliatory tariffs, such as US farmers, are even more supportive of a return to the pre-Trump standard of business-as-usual.