Are Democrats trying to out-hawk Trump on China to spite him?

If you ask Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), President Donald Trump’s trip to China is nothing short of disastrous. “He wants that deal so bad that he can taste it,” Slotkin warned this week at a Politico event. “The guy is about to give away the farm.”

And Slotkin is not alone. As Trump meets today with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Democrats have largely coalesced around a message of opposition to the summit. “Beijing is trying to create a more aggressive, coercive, and lawless international landscape that harms the American people,” argued Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), adding that Trump should “remember who Xi Jinping” is before signing any deals.

So it is that, even as Democrats undergo a painful reconsideration of their approach to Israel, the party still appears unwilling to break with the Biden administration’s hawkish line on China.

Many progressive China analysts fear that Democrats are missing an opportunity to pursue a more diplomatic approach to Washington’s most consequential rivalry. Trump is, by their lights, a deeply flawed messenger. But his desire to meet with Chinese leadership and seek detente in the U.S.-China relationship should be embraced, they argue.

“By virtue of his iconoclastic views, he has created political space, and, in turn, analytical space for a fresh conversation on China policy,” said Ali Wyne, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group.

“The risk for Democrats,” Wyne continued, is that they “end up critiquing him in ways that inadvertently legitimize an increasingly outdated formulation, namely, winning a new Cold War.”

That Trump is now opening space for debate is quite a historical twist. It was Trump, after all, who first broke with Washington’s previous consensus on Beijing, which from the 1970s until the mid-2010s centered on deeper economic engagement between the U.S. and China.

In his first term, Trump surprised many in Washington by launching a trade war with China and gradually ratcheting up his anti-Beijing rhetoric. Backed by hawkish advisers, the president pushed for confrontation, particularly after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, which is widely understood to have originated in China.

When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he picked up where Trump left off. In the early days of the Biden administration, Secretary of State Antony Blinken got into a public, live-streamed argument with his Chinese counterparts about which country was causing more damage to the international order. The relationship only went downhill from there, as the Biden administration imposed export controls on American semiconductors, which convinced Chinese leaders that Washington was determined to restrict Beijing’s economic rise.

By the time Biden left office, a new consensus had emerged in Washington. China went from a partner to public enemy number one, with Democrats and Republicans alike advocating for reducing U.S.-China trade and increasing support for Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province. (On several occasions, Biden broke with traditional U.S. policy and publicly pledged to defend Taiwan in case of invasion, a policy that his aides later walked back.)

Trump, in the early days of his second term, took this hawkish consensus to its limits, launching a tariff war with China that rapidly ballooned into a bilateral crisis. But, when Beijing moved to cut off American access to its rare earth minerals, the administration began singing a different tune. In the months since, Trump has made a series of clear moves toward detente, opening up new lines of communication, reducing restrictions on the export of U.S. AI chips, and encouraging Chinese investment in the U.S. economy.

GOP lawmakers, wary of breaking with the president, have gone along with the shift, or at least avoided any overt criticism of Trump for his emphasis on forging deals with Beijing. Three congressional delegations have gone to China during the first year and a half of Trump’s second term, compared to only one during the entirety of Biden’s time in office.

These trips, which were far more common prior to 2020, have brought down the temperature in the U.S.-China relationship. At a Politico event on Tuesday, Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) said her trip to China last week was “quite successful.”

“To be able to carry out conversations on any number of topics with high officials, high Chinese officials, I think was beneficial for both sides,” Fischer said, citing in particular discussions on trade. “We stressed the importance of having those conversations, having those relationships.”

Some Democrats, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), have used this opportunity to push for cooperation with China on issues of mutual interest, like AI regulation or restrictions on fentanyl precursor chemicals. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) urged greater engagement with Beijing after participating in a delegation late last year.

But most Democratic leaders have maintained the hawkish line of the Biden administration. As Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy told RS, China is “still functioning as a niche issue” because it’s “a little bit politically challenging to message.”

One possible reason for this trend is simple politics. Lawmakers seeking a populist appeal can oppose any economic opening with China on protectionist grounds. Slotkin, for example, has slammed Trump’s idea of importing Chinese cars and introduced a bill that would ban their sale in the United States. For a senator from Michigan, where the auto industry represents 20% of the total workforce, this may be a savvy message.

Further complicating affairs is the fact that China has a “terrible human rights record,” as Jake Werner, the director of the East Asia program at the Quincy Institute, pointed out. This creates a genuine ideological conflict for progressives, who usually favor diplomacy with adversaries but also view the defense of human rights as a key policy goal. “Xi Jinping jails dissidents, crushes free speech and abuses human rights,” progressive Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) argued this week. “Yet Trump praises him—attacking American judges, journalists and educators with more venom than he ever uses to attack foreign dictators.”

Perhaps most important, many progressives simply view China as a lower priority than other issues, meaning that they don’t want to spend effort and political capital to push for change — particularly if it means supporting a president they view as ignoble. From their point of view, “Trump is creating emergencies across every issue area, across every region of the world,” Werner said. “China is one of the only places where it's not an emergency.”

The risk, though, is that progressives miss an opportunity to help stabilize U.S.-China relations before a crisis emerges. Trump is more dovish on China than his advisers. During his meeting with Xi, Trump is expected to push for the creation of a bilateral board of trade and even a board of investment, which would encourage Chinese companies to invest in the U.S. economy. This deepening of economic ties could “change the nature of the relationship” by showing that China “actually has benefits to the United States,” Werner argued.

There is evidence to suggest that Democratic voters would embrace this approach. A recent poll found that 83% of Democrats oppose increased tariffs on products imported from China. And surveys from Pew Research indicate that Democrats are warming toward the country, with 34% saying they have a favorable view of Beijing — a 16-point increase since 2023.

The progressive wonks who spoke to RS took pains to emphasize that they don’t endorse the nitty gritty of Trump’s approach, including his sidelining of China experts in the national security bureaucracy and his brinkmanship on tariffs. But they argue that Democrats must avoid falling into the trap of trying to out-hawk Trump for the sake of it.

“If you want to attack Trump, that's great, but you should attack Trump on the basis of prudent, conflict-avoiding principles,” Werner said. “They should be criticizing him not for engaging in diplomacy, but engaging in the wrong kind of diplomacy.”