Biden's China Policy Needs Realistic Limits on Democracy Demands

President Biden arrived at the State Department in early 2021 with a foreign policy vision that seemed to pull in two directions at once. He had pledged to convene a Summit of Democracy and to confront authoritarianism wherever it took root. At the same time, he acknowledged that the United States would need to work with China—an authoritarian state—to tackle shared crises: the pandemic and climate change. The tension between these two commitments would define how his administration approached one of the most consequential relationships in American foreign policy.

The problem was not new, but it was acute. China's leadership had made its position unmistakable. Xi Jinping, speaking at the World Economic Forum in early 2021, and Yang Jiechi, the director of the Communist Party's foreign affairs office, both signaled the same message: the Chinese Communist Party's survival and grip on power was non-negotiable. This was not a negotiating position. It was a redline.

Yet the Biden administration moved forward anyway. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in his first call with Yang, raised democracy and human rights directly—naming Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong as specific areas of concern before even addressing security matters. According to the Chinese account of the conversation, Yang responded by restating Beijing's position: both countries should respect each other's political systems. The message was clear: stop lecturing us on our internal affairs.

This created a strategic puzzle that the opinion writer Quinn Marschik, a former Trump administration official, laid bare. If the Biden administration wanted to press China on democracy and human rights, what exactly did it want to achieve? Was the goal regime change? Self-determination for the regions where China exercised tight control? A reduction in the visibility of abuses? A return to collective leadership within the Communist Party? Without clarity on these questions, the administration risked appearing both ineffectual and provocative—pushing on issues where American leverage was limited while potentially damaging cooperation on matters where mutual interest existed.

The human reality underlying this diplomatic abstraction was concrete and grave. China's treatment of Uyghur minorities in Xinjiang included forced labor. The regime's control over Tibet and Hong Kong had grown more restrictive. The country's political system had become increasingly totalitarian. No serious observer disputed this record. The question was whether American pressure could change it, and at what cost to other American interests.

Marschik argued for what he called a realistic approach. The Biden administration should acknowledge that it could not remake China's political system through external pressure. It should instead pursue a narrower set of achievable goals: protecting American interests in pandemic response and climate action, standing up for American values through its own conduct and example, and avoiding unnecessary conflict that might foreclose cooperation on matters where the stakes were high. This meant accepting that some Chinese practices would persist, at least in the near term, because the alternative—a complete rupture with Beijing—would serve neither American interests nor the cause of human rights globally.

The administration faced concrete decisions ahead. Would the Summit of Democracy directly address China, and if so, how? Would the U.S. rejoin the United Nations Human Rights Council and use it to systematically raise concerns about Chinese practices? Would multilateral forums like the G7 and G20 become venues for coordinated pressure? These were not rhetorical questions. They would shape whether Biden's China policy reflected idealism, realism, or an unstable mixture of both.