Editor's Note: Dr Sun Taiyi is an assistant professor of political science at Christopher Newport University, U.S. He is also the executive editor of the Global Forum of Chinese Political Scientists' main publication Global China. Sun noted that due to domestic issues and the Ukraine situation, the unveiling of Joe Biden's China policy was long delayed. Sun pointed out that the crucial elements of Biden's China policy have stayed the same in terms of trade, advanced technology and security concern, but specific approaches have been quietly shifting due to constraints and the shifting contradictions for the U.S. Although Biden claimed the so-called Indo-Pacific will be the focus for U.S. foreign policy, Sun doubted if the U.S. could actually prioritize it with the many obstacles and constraints his administration is facing. 

After a year and a half in office, the Biden administration finally unveiled its long-awaited China Strategy via a speech made by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. It was apparent from the beginning that Biden wanted to place China at the center of his foreign policy – about two weeks after his inauguration, he said in a speech at the State Department that China was the "most serious competitor." If the priority has been China all along, why the wait?   

The contradictions

In his article "On Contradictions," Mao Zedong described the relationship between principal contradiction and secondary contradiction and the principal and secondary aspects of a contradiction. Even though Biden would like to focus on China, his domestic agenda and partisan politics quickly became the principal contradiction for his team. Despite occupying the White House and having the majority in both chambers of Congress, the Biden administration could not get major victories under his "Build Back Better" agenda. Inflation is at a historic high. The COVID-19 pandemic never seemed to go away completely. Even worse, the lopsided Supreme Court is expected to overturn Roe v. Wade, stripping American women of their fundamental rights. More recently, with mass shootings occurring almost daily, the relevant legislation is going nowhere. As a result, the Biden-led Democratic Party is bracing for a major defeat in the midterms this year. When your house is on fire, you don't have the energy and resource to take action against your most serious competitor.

After the conflict in Ukraine began, foreign policy temporarily trumped domestic issues, and Biden's Russia-heavy "State of the Union" address also got him an ephemeral approval rating bump. Consequently, even on the foreign front, Russia was the more urgent principal aspect of the contradiction, leaving China to be a "long-term challenge" or a "pacing challenge." The situation in Ukraine also delayed the announcement of the Biden administration's strategy on China, which was largely completed last fall – there is no appetite for the U.S. to get into conflicts with two major powers at once, and so the announcement of strategy on China was postponed until more recently as legislators including Senator Mitt Romney continued to push for the strategy's release. However, the reality is apparent that China at the moment is still not the principal contradiction or the principal aspect of a contradiction. Such a reality set the background for Blinken's speech.

The evolution

A few weeks after becoming secretary of state, Blinken stated the possibilities of the U.S.' relationship with China being "competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, adversarial when it must be." After more than a year, Blinken has clarified both the goal (to shape the strategic environment around Beijing) and the tactics (to invest, align, and compete) of the Biden administration's strategy on China. During this process, there are crucial elements that have stayed the same and others that have evolved.

The Biden administration's trade policy is primarily Trump 2.0. In the name of a "worker-centered approach," it is a continuation of the protectionist policy that only benefits a few domestic suppliers at the expense of the larger American consumers, let alone making the global economy less efficient. Being dominant in advanced technologies is still important, and the U.S. has every intention to be able to write the rules of the future – so that China could not do that. The Biden administration, from its inception, valued alliances, and it is continuing to empower allies with asymmetric capabilities to improve their security. Thus, the Biden administration has not changed its hawkish stance toward China on all of those issues.   

On the other hand, specific approaches have been quietly shifting due to constraints and the shifting contradictions mentioned above. When Blinken was talking about "invest," the elephant in the room was the opposition in Congress that obstructs Biden's agenda constantly. Therefore, even though Biden wanted to invest more, there was no money – the $150 million commitment to ASEAN is not on the same scale as China's pledge of $1.5 billion a few months ago, not counting additional financial support brought along through the Belt and Road Initiative. 

The preference to divide the world into two simplistic camps of democracies versus autocracies is also under doubt, for important allies are either not democratic (such as Saudi Arabia) or quickly becoming more authoritarian (such as India). On "align," the Biden administration is also second-guessing its strategy to move away from grand coalitions and "pursue bespoke or ad hoc bodies focused on individual problems," as Kurt Campbell had suggested before becoming Biden's Asia tsar. The announcement of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework was trading quality for quantity – making significant compromises with minimal substantive implementations and enforcements to get more countries aboard. Regarding "compete," the Biden team is also shifting to rely more on coast guards than conventional navy ships to constrain fishing militias without escalating conflicts. In a nutshell, there has been major evolution on "invest, align and compete" since Biden took office. 

Making the Taiwan Straits more dangerous

Even though Biden has called himself a "gaffe machine," the affirmative answer that the U.S. would be willing to "get involved militarily to defend Taiwan" was no gaffe but a calculated move. It was not the first time Biden had misspoken about the U.S. stance on the Taiwan question, and unlike the previous two times since he became president, Biden has been emboldened by how the situation in Ukraine is going. We can assume that the bureaucracy still wants to maintain strategic ambiguity. However, since Biden is the commander-in-chief, if he believes the U.S. has made commitments to "defend Taiwan," it could send the wrong signals to Taiwan's authorities, potentially triggering irreversible escalations. 

Even though both Beijing and Washington claim that they want to maintain the status quo, their ideas about the status quo are quite different. Washington sees Beijing's rise, both economically and militarily, inevitably tipping the balance on the two sides of the straits. Thus, the U.S. sees equipping the Taiwan region with asymmetric capabilities as the way to restore balance – the status quo. However, Beijing reiterates that the status quo of the Taiwan question is that there is but one China in the world, and Taiwan is part of China, and the Government of the People's Republic of China is the sole legal government representing China. China thinks Washington's actions are directly altering the status quo and moving away from the three China-U.S. joint communiques, noting that the detailed interpretations have been recently removed from the State Department's relevant web page. The Biden administration will continue to boost Taiwan's asymmetric capabilities while such actions will undoubtedly increase rather than decrease the possibility of major confrontations.

Blinken's speech, following Biden's first visit to Asia as president, has indicated clearly that the so-called Indo-Pacific will be the focal point for U.S. foreign policy for years to come. The signing of a security agreement between China and the Solomon Islands and the subsequent U.S. reactions are good testaments of the tense geopolitical competitions down the road. However, with the many obstacles and constraints the Biden administration faces, it is yet to be seen if the stated priority can actually be prioritized.