“China can be relieved, despite the prospect of a fierce trade war”

LRepublican candidate Donald Trump therefore becomes the 47th^e President of the United States, at the end of an election won hard by his insults, his excesses and his tortuous arguments.

The economic and strategic landscape of the planet risks being profoundly modified, because dangerous upheavals in international relations are to be feared, given his personality, his messianic obsession with the greatness of America, his fascination with dictators and his total contempt for his allies.

The fog surrounding his future foreign policy is all the thicker as the campaign has become polarized around domestic policy problems: inflation, abortion, migration crisis. However, the contrast with the positions of his democratic opponent allows us to identify some strong points, in particular with regard to China.

A striking contrast

The positions defended on international relations by the two candidates indeed offered a striking contrast, particularly on the crucial issue of the Sino-American relationship.

In the background of the Harris-Trump match, the clash of two opposing universes played out: on the one hand the multilateralism of the Democrat based on cooperation between States to establish common rules, on the other a supremacist and isolationist, reduced to a pure transactional exercise in a sort of jungle, to make American interests triumph through bargaining.

Beijing refrained from taking a position between the two candidates during the campaign, but Donald Trump seemed to have the favor of Chinese leaders by default, judging by the systematic denigration of Kamala Harris in the media social controlled by power. Certainly, Beijing's strategists abhor the brutal and erratic behavior of the Republican, but they were able to detect the flaws for four years.

For Xi Jinping, politics and ideology trump economics. The “Red Emperor” wants to lead China on the path to world leadership by proposing a “common destiny for humanity in the new era”an emphatic formula to actually designate a new Sinocentric and anti-Western world order. Kamala Harris therefore represented in her eyes a much more dangerous threat to this dream of a Sinocentric international system, because the Democrat – like her predecessor – aimed to maintain a world order governed by rules, with America playing a leading role in the promotion of democracy and human rights.

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