The Evolution of US-China Relations at the Beginning of the 21st Century: from George Bush to J. Biden

The relationship between China and the US started to develop on the topic of economy at the end of 20th – beginning of the 21st centuries. While the US became sole superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union, China appeared as a rapidly developing state with huge economic perspective. The economic rivalry, that was born between the two states, will lead to the security dilemma and other controversies between them. Still, the economic aspect of this relationship is crucial and leading. Starting the 21st century with the presidency of George Bush Jr., Bush Sr. - his father - saw opportunities and a bright future in the relationship with China, that is why he was strengthening and improving relations with it. However, Bush Jr. started his first year of presidency with the criticism of China in terms of their human rights policy, which already meant not a very good start of relations between Bush Jr. and China. Still, the cooperation between the two states continued to develop. Additionally, this chapter will introduce reader to the neo-conservative ideology, which played a crucial role in understanding the foreign policy of different American leaders. The next President, Barack Obama, who was elected twice to be the head of the US and ruled the state until the year 2017, continued to build healthy and mutually pleasant relations with China. He was the first President to visit China as soon as he became a President of the US, which showed his serious attitude towards China as a strategic partner. As it was mentioned by Cheng Li (2016), “trust deficit” and misunderstanding was a huge problem for these two states. Different policies were made by the Obama administration that could have been harmful for the Chinese economy. They did not know how to react to these policies, that is why their answer to the US behavior was considered as an overreaction, which led the US to consider their defensive policies. All in all, this long period of Obama’s presidency was full of events and will be discussed more precisely later. Moving on to the next President of the US, Donald Trump, his attitude towards the Chinese question was unlikely for previous Presidents. Trump never concealed his goals not to let China overcome the US and publicly claimed his intensions to fight for the status of top-1 economy. His presidency period can be called the start of economic or, usually called, trade war between the US and China. Most of Trump’s policies were unsuitable for Chinese plans on developing the international economy, among them there will be discussed Trump’s “America First” policy, his unwillingness to fight climate change in expense of unhealthy production, barriers towards China, etc. While Trump is claimed to be the most harming President for Sino-US relations, Joe Biden’s attitude is still unclear. There are different thoughts on how he will continue the heritage that Donald Trump left him, whether the strategic rivalry will continue and even grow, or whether these states will be able to find peaceful coexistence and come to a compromise. Mainly, President Biden agrees with Donald Trump on calling China the greatest rival for and danger for the US economy, still, it seems that the current President of the United States is more consistent and less harsh and aggressive towards this rivalry. In order to be able to give a more sustainable analysis and argumentation, a wide number of different literatures both academic and non-academic will be discussed. Additionally, the policies will go through the survey of SWOT analysis, which is believed to build a strong analytical framework on the question of analyzing policies and factors that influenced the relationship. All of the presidential timelines will be covered and analyzed in this essay far more deeply later in the main body of this research, still, with the given information in the abstract, readers can approximately understand the course of this research and what to expect from it.