Presidential Transition & U.S.-China Relations

This is Dr. Chang's 8th nook entitled, Presidential Transition and U.S.- China Relations. The previous seven books are, US-China Relations (2015), Understanding the U.S. and China (2016), The Changing Giants - The U.S. and China (2017), New World Order - The Bipolar View (2018), The U.S. - China Issues - Trade +++ (2019), Isolationism and Globalism in U.S. - China Relations (2020), and Calculated Rivalry between the U.S. and China (2021).

Since Pompeo trashed Nixon's legacy at the Nixon library in 2019 and created the 'Uighur Genocide' story to attack China, the US-China relations have been spiraling down on multiple fronts from trade issues to technology sanctions and diplomatic confrontations. Biden's victory over Trump did not alter the blame China and anti-China strategy except making the attack tactics from 'me alone' to 'we wish' in formulating the U.S. anti-China policy. Biden Administration still targets China as the most serious competitor short of calling China enemy. Biden devotes a lot of energy to fulfill a 'we wish' alliance to confront China. The formation of QUAD+ or AUKUS to start a NATO like Indo-Pacific alliance surrounding China seems to be more a wishful thinking than a practical strategy. Many of the South East Asia countries are openly opposing to be pressured to take sides between the U.S. - China competition. The formation of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP, a free trade agreement among 15 members, including China not U.S., covers about 30% of world GDP) is a clear evidence. Competition between two giant nations are expected but taking an all-out competition, trade, technology, military, diplomacy (even applying diplomatic boycott on the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics), and creating separate supply chain or incompatible communication systems are bizarre.

A true world leader must accept competition as challenges and must have confidence to seek mutually beneficial solutions. The current all-out competition between the U.S. and China with no constructive dialogue and genuine cooperation is destructive. There are plenty of areas the two great nations can cooperate and reap benefits. Fruitful cooperation can be found in agriculture, world healthcare, infrastructure construction, climate change and space exploration just to name a few. This book is entitled, Presidential Transitin and U.S. - China Relations, that is because the author would like the readers to read this book with the presidential transition as the backdrop. The author will illustrate the importance of leadership of governance to the national destiny from a historical perspective. History is important for leaders and citizens to draw lessons from and to avoid repeating deadly mistakes. Leaders are produced by political systems adopted by nations. Good or bad leaders do have a correlation with the political system and citizens awareness of the efficacy of the political system. Change of leaders, thus transition, is unavoidable in all political systems even in an authoritative royal family system since human life is generally limited to a century long. In the U.S., a democratic system has been evolved over 250 years to a bipartisan system. The presidency was limited to two four year term by an amendment passed by the Congress in 1947. Hence the U.S. presidency has a mandated transition either at eight years or four in the event the president did not seek or lost the second term. This 4 or 8 year periodic transition naturally has a significan impact to the governance of the country. The positive aspect is that an incompetent president can be smoothly removed after four years but the negative aspect is that a competent president has to be replaced by a new one who may not be as competent or cause discontinuity in national policies. This book will discuss some of the issues and specifically will focus on the four-year++ Biden-Trump transition with 60 essays included.