On China, Harris is a blank slate

The least noticed element of Kamala Harris’s Chicago acceptance speech was what she did not say. Other than a brief milquetoast declaration of faith in America’s global leadership, she made no mention of China. Given that both Democrats and Republicans see the rise of China as America’s existential challenge — their only big area of overlap — Harris’s silence was significant. True, she only made one reference to India, which was about her immigrant mother, Shyamala. For some utterly scandalous reason, my native Britain received no mention at all (along with France and Germany the UK must make do with “Nato allies”, which got two references). Still, America’s friends are not in question. How Harris would handle China is of acute relevance to America’s voters and the world. So far we are none the wiser.

It is striking that Harris has never visited China. By contrast, her running mate, Tim Walz, spent a year teaching in the Chinese city of Foshan as a young man. His time there coincided with the June 4 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which had a deep effect on him. But as Harris could attest, vice-presidents don’t get to make foreign policy. The relevance of Walz’s China exposure is that Republicans see it as a vulnerability. They have done their best to depict Walz’s long-ago sojourn as a sign of disloyalty to America. Republicans in the House of Representatives have even launched an investigation into Walz’s “long-standing and cosy relationship with China”. What they should conclude is that it is great that someone running for high office has first-hand experience of America’s chief adversary. What they will doubtless hint is that Walz is soft on Chinese communism. Even more explicitly, Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, last week tweeted: “Walz is an example of how Beijing patiently grooms future American leaders.” Joe McCarthy is evidently not dead; he’s just muttering in his sleep.

What can we assume about Harris on China? The truth is that we know very little about her foreign policy philosophy. As a senator, she often spoke up about human rights. But I doubt she will divide the world into autocrats versus democrats with the same Manichean simplicity as Biden. His democracy summits left no trace at all.

Harris also gives signs that she is not quite so enamoured of industrial policy as Biden. His nostalgia for blue-collar manufacturing jobs, particularly ones that involve bashing metal, does not seem to be matched by Harris. Even in the absence of a quest for high-paying middle-skilled jobs that no longer exist, China provides sufficient rationale alone for US industrial policy. I would expect Harris to continue Biden’s “small yard, high fence” on high-end semiconductor exports and technology sharing with China. But I doubt she will take a more hawkish line. She has already signalled an aversion to trade wars. Harris has repeatedly attacked Trump’s plans for a massive tariff increase on China as well as a smaller one on all imports.

Harris’s national security adviser, Phil Gordon, is highly sceptical of US-China decoupling. Gordon, about whom my colleague Felicia Schwartz wrote an interesting profile in last week’s FT, would be likeliest to replace Jake Sullivan as national security adviser to the president were Harris elected. In this 2020 piece in War on the Rocks, Gordon attacked the idea of decoupling as a “fantasy” and laid out its economic damage to Americans. In contrast to Sullivan, who at that point had been writing for two years about a “foreign policy for the middle class”, Gordon did not mention industrial policy in his essay. There is a limited value to poring over old pieces to try to figure out what a public figure might do. But it is precisely because Harris’s foreign policy views are so unformed — or at least, unknown — that her closest adviser’s is relevant. Having just finished writing my full life biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, I appreciate the relevance of the intellectual work that foreign policy strategists published when not in government.

Peter, you have been watching US-China relations as closely as I have. Like me, you know Gordon personally. We both also know that Gordon has an unusual football (soccer to Americans) affiliation. He supports England and even teases government colleagues by wearing an England shirt when there is a big World Cup game. This goes some way to atone for Harris’s failure to mention my country in Chicago. More seriously, though, what potential areas of divergence on China do you see between a Harris and Biden administration?

Recommended reading 

• While we’re on China — and Jake Sullivan — do read my colleague Demetri Sevastopulo’s Big Read on the “secret back channel between the US and China”. 

• Along with Peter, I was in Chicago last week and wrote two columns. The first was on how Democrats tried to keep the Israeli-Gaza situation out of the conversation — “Gaza is the word Democrats dare not whisper in Chicago”. My second was on the astonishing metamorphosis of Kamala Harris.

• Talking of the 2024 election, Andy Haldane has a thought-provoking FT op-ed arguing that it is time for central banks, including the US Fed, to start more aggressive monetary easing. In Jackson Hole last week, Jay Powell said the time has come to cut rates. If the Fed cuts by a bolder than usual half a percentage point next month, they can be sure of hearing from Trump.

• Finally do also read Stanford’s Marietje Schaake on why governments must push back on “tech bullies”, especially Elon Musk. I wrote on that theme recently. As Schaake points out, the EU’s Thierry Breton wrote to Musk about his obligations to fairness. Musk replied with a meme that said, “fuck your own face”. Regular Swampians will be unsurprised by the maturity of Musk’s response. 

Peter Spiegel responds

Ed, you’re right that, other than Walz’s idiosyncratic history with China, Harris and those around her are something of a blank slate when it comes to the Middle Kingdom.

What has struck me most about those advisers around her, including Gordon, is how much more Obama-esque their view of the world is than their current boss, Joe Biden. (That probably could be said of the entire Democratic convention, to be honest. Harris clearly wants to channel Obama circa 2008 rather than Biden 2020.) 

To oversimplify, Biden is the embodiment of the postwar liberal internationalist, looking to promote human rights and democracy abroad through the various tools of American power. Obama, on the other hand, was more squarely in the Kissengerian “realist” camp, willing to set aside Iran’s human rights abuses, to choose just one example, in exchange for a nuclear deal.

If Harris will be more Obama than Biden on China, then, what would that really mean? Obama famously implemented a “pivot to Asia” that was meant to engage China but also to energise alliances in the Pacific, both from a security perspective as well as an economic one, through the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP faltered, engagement with China led nowhere . . . but American allies in the region are now far more focused and engaged with each other on countering Chinese aggression in the region. So it wasn’t all for naught.

If past is prologue, we might expect Harris to be more willing to engage with autocrats like Xi Jinping to advance American interests, regardless of the implications for human rights and democracy inside China. But that fails to take into account the domestic political debate over China in the US, which may ultimately be the driving factor. The bipartisan hawkishness towards Beijing in Washington is likely to constrain any engagement instincts Harris (or Gordon) has towards the Xi regime. In other words, I’m not expecting a Harris thaw.