Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, greeted then Vice President Joe Biden in 2013 in Beijing.
Photo: Lintao Zhang/Getty ImagesWASHINGTON—Joe Biden says his decades of experience dealing with China make him better suited than President Trump to handle Beijing, though that record is drawing scrutiny over whether he mishandled the emerging U.S. rival.
As a senator and then as vice president, Mr. Biden backed trade deals with Beijing and spent time with several Chinese leaders, especially the current president, Xi Jinping. He asserted U.S. interests, his aides said, pushing back against Chinese expansion in the South China Sea and pressure on economic policy.
On the campaign trail, however, Mr. Biden has at times appeared dismissive of China’s ability to overtake the U.S. as a global power. “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” he said in Iowa last May.
As the presumptive Democratic nominee heads into a general election battle with Mr. Trump, both sides are fighting over China. The president’s allies are portraying Mr. Biden as too accommodating to China at the expense of U.S. interests. The “eat our lunch” remark features in a Trump campaign attack ad.
The Biden camp has countered in ads and at events that Mr. Trump failed to hold Mr. Xi accountable over the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in China.
In 2011, Vice President Joseph Biden, second from right, and Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping at a ceremony in Beijing.
Photo: Ng Han Guan/Associated PressMr. Biden’s dealings with China in the past broadly accord with a U.S. policy of engaging Beijing that was pursued by Democrats and Republicans alike but that has been replaced with a more hawkish consensus across Washington.
The Obama administration, at least in its first years, sought to manage China’s rise by trying to integrate the budding power into the U.S.-led global order. Former aides, some of whom are advising Mr. Biden, said that in retrospect they misread Beijing’s intentions to supplant the U.S. as the leading global power, particularly under Mr. Xi’s more autocratic rule.
Jake Sullivan, a foreign-policy adviser to Mr. Biden’s campaign and his former national-security adviser as vice president, said Mr. Xi “has taken China in a different direction from the point of view of being more aggressive, more assertive than his predecessors.”
Mr. Biden first traveled to China in 1979 as a junior senator, meeting Deng Xiaoping, the Communist leader who launched market reforms. Mr. Biden backed free-trade legislation that helped China join the World Trade Organization, making the country a magnet for foreign investment and export manufacturing.
As President Obama’s vice president, Mr. Biden was tasked with getting to know Mr. Xi, who was then China’s vice president and being groomed for the No. 1 post.
In 2011 and 2012, the two spent 25 hours together by Mr. Biden’s estimate at private meals with only interpreters in Beijing, Washington and the Sichuanese capital of Chengdu. “I’ve spent more time in private meetings with Xi Jinping than any world leader,” Mr. Biden has often said on the campaign trail.
At a Democratic presidential debate in February, Mr. Biden described Mr. Xi as a “thug” who “doesn’t have a democratic…bone in his body.”
Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said the Obama team was “naive at the outset” in thinking global problems could be solved if Washington and Beijing cooperated.
Mr. Biden, she said, “has downplayed the threat from China. But I think over the last year he has come to understand that” either Beijing poses more of a threat, or his former approach wasn’t politically opportune. “I don’t know which one is the case,” said Ms. Glaser, who is also critical of Mr. Trump’s China policies.
Mr. Biden has offered few specific policy prescriptions on how he would approach China if elected. Instead, he and his supporters have focused criticism on what they see as the deteriorating relationship between Washington and Beijing under Mr. Trump, friction with U.S. allies and how those have damaged U.S. standing to China’s advantage.
“ I’ve spent more time in private meetings with Xi Jinping than any world leader. ”
The White House referred a request for comment to Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign. It said Mr. Trump delivered on his campaign promises “to get tough on China” and cited his trade policies and the restrictions he placed on travel from China in January after the coronavirus outbreak.
Mr. Biden’s foreign policy advisers—almost all of whom are veterans of the Obama administration—said a Biden presidency would seek to renew U.S. involvement in international agreements they say were designed to curtail Beijing’s influence. It would also move to reinstall U.S. public-health experts in China whose presence was reduced by funding cuts under Mr. Trump.
“One key component of his approach to China would be starting to show up again,” said Tony Blinken, a former deputy secretary of state and a top Biden adviser.
The tariffs Mr. Trump has imposed on more than $370 billion of Chinese goods would be reviewed, Mr. Blinken and others said, though they stopped short of saying whether or not a President Biden would lift them.
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Mr. Biden’s campaign has said Mr. Trump strengthened Beijing’s sway by refusing to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade pact negotiated during Mr. Obama’s tenure and that excludes China. The 11 other nations have gone ahead without the U.S., and Mr. Biden has said he would renegotiate entry, pushing for tougher labor and environmental rules in a bid to appease trade skeptics.
During the 2016 presidential election, the TPP became a symbol of global free-trade deals that critics said disadvantaged American workers. Hillary Clinton came out against the deal after initially supporting it as secretary of state. Mr. Trump pilloried the pact as a candidate and withdrew from it on one of his first days in office.
Mr. Trump and his allies have sought to draw attention to Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, and his ties to an investment firm in China, just as they did previously with his business ties in Ukraine.
Hunter Biden traveled to Beijing on Air Force Two in December 2013 when his father made an official visit, and 12 days later the firm BHR Partners was officially registered. Hunter Biden was a director of the firm.
Mr. Trump has alleged without evidence that Hunter Biden “walked out of China with $1.5 billion in a fund” while his father was vice president.
Last October, Hunter Biden resigned from the company’s board and vowed not to work for any foreign-owned businesses if his father is elected president. There is no evidence that Mr. Biden acted improperly on his son’s behalf. Mr. Biden told a CBS affiliate in Miami this week that his son’s work had “nothing to do” with him.
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On his trips to China as vice president, former aides say, Mr. Biden evinced confidence in the U.S.’s ability to compete with China, a sentiment he has carried on the campaign trail.
In 2011 in Beijing, when the U.S. was still dealing with the aftermath of the financial crisis, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told Mr. Biden, “I’m sorry your economy is in such terrible shape,” according to Danny Russel, then the top White House adviser on Asia, who witnessed the exchange. Mr. Wen questioned whether Beijing’s multibillion-dollar investment in U.S. Treasury bills was safe.
The vice president replied that if China wanted to sell, “please go ahead,” Mr. Russel recalled. More than 90% of Treasurys were owned by Americans, Mr. Biden continued, and “No one ever won betting against the American people,” according to Mr. Russel.
China’s embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Obama administration veterans credit Mr. Biden’s engagement with Mr. Xi with some successes: China backed off aggressive military maneuvers near American ships and planes for a time and agreed to sign onto the Paris climate accord, from which Mr. Trump has since moved to withdraw the U.S.
That Mr. Xi took China on a more aggressive path, they said, didn’t invalidate trying to engage Beijing.
“It was worth testing the proposition” that Mr. Xi was going to be a different kind of Chinese leader, a former aide said. “I think it was the right strategy play. And it ended up not working out.”
Write to Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com and Sabrina Siddiqui at Sabrina.Siddiqui@wsj.com
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