China has invariably been an important topic of discussion in past campaigns, starting with the October 1960 debate between Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy, which featured an extended back and forth over the disputed islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait. Almost all subsequent presidential debates, including the three encounters between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, have included exchanges on Sino-American relations. Is the American electorate so overwhelmed by polarised social media discourse and the 24-hour news cycle that it has lost its appetite for substantive policy discussions?
Other than a few glib remarks, surprisingly, little was said about China at this month’s US presidential debate. Former President Donald Trump asserted that his proposed import tariffs would punish “China and all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years”. Vice-President Kamala Harris, for her part, disparaged China’s pandemic response, stating that President Xi Jinping “was responsible for lacking and not giving us transparency about the origins of Covid”.
The failure to focus on China was, in one sense, predictable. US voters have been largely fixated on other anxieties during this election cycle: abortion and women’s reproductive rights, immigration and border security, and inflation and pocketbook issues. The moderators and their preselected line of questioning did little to probe what could well be America’s most consequential foreign-policy issue of the twenty-first century, even though the Commission on the National Defense Strategy and the White House’s National Security Strategy have elevated China risks to near existential status. A failure to address this issue made no sense.
