Even after election, Washington remains firmly anti-China, but US states see things differently
- While both political parties are united in their suspicions, states like Arkansas and Tennessee seek more trade and students
- States ‘have to attract and create jobs, and look after the businesses in their states’, one analyst notes. ‘And China is an important piece of that puzzle.’
Asa Hutchinson, the Republican governor of Arkansas, a southern state that is very much pro-Donald Trump – nearly 63 per cent of its residents just voted for him – knows what he wants from China: more students and more trade.
“Whoever is elected, I would hope that one of the first things on their agenda is to try to re-engage at least in conversations with China’s leadership,” Hutchinson said last month during an online panel hosted by the Washington think tank Brookings Institution.
If those feelings come as a surprise, given his location and affiliation, it may be because another politician from the same state and the same party – the freshly re-elected Senator Tom Cotton – essentially seeks the opposite, writing bills in Congress this year to ban some Chinese students from the US and to cut off America’s trade with Beijing.
In the Xi Jinping era, congressional Democrats and Republicans have found themselves in unusually close alignment in their views of China. Frayed by Trump’s trade war, the US-China relationship continues to unravel – tensions are soaring over what Washington calls Beijing’s human rights abuses, the imposition of a national security law in Hong Kong and the coronavirus pandemic.
In Washington, at least, there is little debate: China is up to no good.
Even after last week’s elections, that assessment is unlikely to change when the Biden administration begins January 20, experts said. Nor does it matter whether Democrats take control of the Senate, which probably won’t be resolved until two run-off races in Georgia in early January.
“Bills related to Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan have passed both houses with almost unanimous support,” noted Anna Ashton, the senior director of government affairs at the US-China Business Council. “It is hard to imagine that this trend will change significantly in the next Congress, regardless of which party ends up controlling the Senate.”
Instead, experts say that the divide between Hutchinson and Cotton, the two Arkansas Republicans, represents a different China-related dispute that has received far less attention.
