The Presidential election campaign is heating up in the US and Donald Trump is eyeing a second-straight term at the office. Trump and the Republicans are relying on the anti-China sentiment to garner the votes as the American economy has gone into a tailspin due to the China virus—as Trump likes to call it. However, Beijing, after being on the offence for the last six months has now toned down its aggressive posturing. The sudden shift in strategy from Beijing is seen by political analysts as a countermeasure to keep Trump out of power.
According to a report in South China Morning Post, Chinese diplomats are now calling for dialogue to prevent the US-China relations from worsening. In an interview, China’s foreign vice-minister Le Yucheng, stood “ready for talks” with his American counterparts.
Infamous for employing the wolf-warrior strategy whenever it comes to antagonizing its opponents, China has taken a complete 180-degree flip on it. The report states that Le is the second Chinese diplomat in the last two weeks to come up with such conciliatory messages to pour cold water over the burned relations between the two countries.
More recently, Yang Jiechi- a member of the Communist Party Politburo—considered as Beijing’s leading diplomat also called on both China and the US to seize opportunities for cooperation.
The vile Xi Jinping regime has understood that giving Trump the gasoline by going toe-to-toe with him is only going to benefit the latter. The Republican candidate is looking to milk the China issue to get the keys to the Oval office yet again.
According to a Pew Research Center survey, 73 per cent American adults hold an unfavourable view of China, which shows a sharp rise of 26 per cent from 2018 when 47 per cent Americans said that they viewed the Middle Kingdom unfavourably.
There has been a rise of 7 per cent in unfavourable views since March when Trump started making an election issue out of China and his approval rating sees a sudden spike when the attacks on China is widely reported in the media circles.
The report might have sent the warning bells ringing over mainland China leading to a quick reversal of Xi Jinping’s strategy. At the moment, China is the aggressor in the American public’s eye. But, with over three months left for the elections to happen, Beijing is trying to go dormant, so that Trump looks like the aggressor who is trying to hide his failures behind China.
For Beijing, the calculation is pretty simple. If Trump stays in power, Beijing will have to move backwards to fulfil the other phase of the Trade deals. The first phase of the Trade deal has nearly broken the back of Beijing and in February-March, it even indicated that it will pull the plug from the deal.
However, after Trump and the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave Beijing the side-eye and threatened it with dire consequences, China had to go back on its promise of honouring the trade-deal.
The two countries up until now have been engaged in a bitter fight. The USA closed the Houston Consulate which was dubbed as a centre of China’s embezzlement activities regarding Intellectual Property Theft. Beijing retaliated by closing down the much unheard Chengdu consulate in mainland China and it marked a new low in the relations between the two countries.
The Democrats and Republicans are at loggerheads over the China issue. Joe Biden and the democrats do not consider China as an enemy and are still living in the cold-war era where Russia was the ultimate villain.
Beijing posits that if Democrats come into power than the relations between two nations will become sober and Beijing will again have the inroads and means to fester and decay the United States from the inside.
The Republicans, on the other hand, don’t hate Russia. But, they hate China as it is visible from Trump’s foreign policy thrust. And now, Beijing doesn’t wants to give any fodder to Trump so that he doesn’t have any burning issues to take a dig at China. A shrewd manoeuvre from China but it has come to a tad too late as its biggest curse to the Humankind—the Coronavirus is on a rampage in the States and Trump is not letting this issue slide by ideality.
