Trump’s China Threats Don’t Match His China Policy
Foreign Policy·July 21, 2026
AI Summary
Trump has made threats toward China regarding alleged election interference, but his stated policies toward Beijing don't consistently align with these aggressive claims. The discrepancy highlights tensions between his rhetoric and actual diplomatic or trade actions taken against China.
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: U.S. President Donald Trump alleges Chinese interference in the 2020 election, Chinese and Philippine personnel clash in the South China Sea, and the United States and China will reportedly hold talks on artificial intelligence in September.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s speech last Thursday—in which he alleged foreign interference, particularly by China, in the 2020 election—was full of falsehoods. From the perspective of U.S.-China relations, however, what was striking was not the extremity of the claims about China, but the lack of any expectation that they should result in a tougher China policy.
If Trump genuinely believed that China had mounted a large-scale operation to subvert American democracy, one would expect a severe response. Instead, his second-term China policy has been consistently softer than either his own first administration or that of former U.S. President Joe Biden. Time and again, Trump’s actions have run counter to the threat he claims to have uncovered.
Trump released a slate of newly declassified intelligence documents to supposedly support his accusations. One of these dubiously claims that China used TikTok to collect extensive data on American voters. Yet Trump illegally delayed enforcement of the TikTok ban in order to negotiate a politically advantageous deal.
Many of Trump’s other claims pertain to Chinese cyberaggression, even as his administration slashed U.S. cybersecurity capabilities, especially for electoral security. Trump also personally approved the export of high-powered Nvidia chips to China.
This pattern extends well beyond Trump. Across U.S. right-wing politics, China has become a floating signifier: an idea so detached from actual meaning that it can be adapted to fit almost any interpretation. China has long served as a screen onto which Americans of all political stripes project their hopes and fears.
What is new is the abandonment of even the pretense that rhetoric about China should correspond to actual Chinese behavior or coherent China policy. The shift is particularly noticeable in defense circles, where many self-described China hawks have subordinated long-standing policy positions to Trumpian political loyalty.
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This can produce some surreal results, such as when a representative of Truth Social recently declared, “I’ve lived in Beijing. I can say the elections in Beijing are much better than California and the United States.” (China does not have democratic elections today. It briefly experimented with semi-democratic elections of village leaders in a few limited areas beginning in the 1980s, but even then, Beijing—due to its political sensitivity—never had legitimate contention.)
More commonly, however, China simply functions as an all-purpose bogeyman. In U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s racist new election ad, for instance, China exists only as an undefined threat to her state of Tennessee’s land and values. Contrast that with previous election cycles, where China served as a stand-in for U.S. job losses from globalization. That was an exaggerated and often xenophobic idea but one with at least some connection to reality.
None of this means that Chinese political interference is imaginary. Documented examples do exist, but they are generally smaller in scale, either focused on the Chinese diaspora or aimed at shaping individual politicians’ positions on China rather than electing one political party over another.
In Australia, for instance, Chinese hackers targeted politicians based on their stance on Beijing’s human rights abuses, not their party affiliation. In New York, Beijing has sought to bring Chinese American civic organizations under its influence. And in universities around the world, Beijing has attempted to interfere in Chinese student group elections to promote candidates favored by Chinese embassies.
These activities are legitimate concerns, but they bear little resemblance to elaborate fantasies of mass voter fraud. They are better understood as campaigns of community influence, online propaganda, and, above all, intelligence gathering.
Canada is a useful example here. In response to allegations of Chinese interference in its 2019 and 2021 elections, Canada conducted extensive investigations and found that these activities did not affect election results. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service assessed these efforts as “low-risk, high-reward” operations primarily directed at controlling Chinese Canadian communities and encouraging politicians to adopt pro-China policies.
It is also important to distinguish between interference and influence. China routinely attempts to persuade foreign political and business elites that they share interests with Beijing. But this is not unique to China. In Washington circles, China’s presence is small compared to, for instance, that of the United Arab Emirates.
An effective response to Chinese interference needs to be impartial, rational about the scale and nature of the threat, anti-racist, and coordinated closely with the Chinese diaspora, which is the main target of these operations. Even if it genuinely wished to counter foreign interference, the Trump administration has demonstrated little capacity for such a measured approach.
South China Sea confrontation. Chinese and Philippine maritime personnel are once again clashing in the South China Sea. China has disputes with almost all of its maritime neighbors, but the Philippines has been the most aggressive in pushing back against Beijing’s claims, including through a notable—though largely unenforced—2016 arbitration victory, which China rejects.
Maritime confrontations between China and the Philippines have become almost routine, though they have so far not yet involved lethal violence. The fear, however, is that these tense standoffs and skirmishing will give way to deadly escalation, as was the case with China’s border disputes with the Soviet Union in 1969 and India in 2020.
Soybean purchases. As part of last year’s trade talks with the United States, China pledged to buy significant amounts of U.S. soybeans. But Chinese purchases of U.S. soybeans fell 20.6 percent year-on-year in June and a whopping 42.4 percent for the first half of the year.
This is partially a result of Trump’s aggressive tariff policies, but it also represents a wider shift toward other suppliers, notably Brazil. This has driven massive Chinese investment in Brazilian agribusiness—particularly the expansion of farming in the country’s north—raising concerns over further deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.
AI talks. Reuters reported on Tuesday that Beijing and Washington will hold talks on artificial intelligence in September, as U.S. firms scramble to respond to a new generation of Chinese AI models.
The United States maintains a narrow lead, but China’s embrace of open-weight AI models—in which the underlying architecture is publicly released for others to study, modify, and build upon—is undercutting domestic firms. In response, several U.S. AI companies have urged the Trump administration to protect their business interests, framing the Chinese approach as “AI communism.”
Tech stock tumble. Even as U.S. AI firms panic, Chinese investors appear less convinced by Beijing’s strategy. Chinese tech stocks sharply declined last week, prompting a nearly $9 billion injection by government-backed funds to stabilize the market.
The stock market is less important in China than in the United States, and government intervention is common, but the latest move may indicate domestic skepticism of an AI strategy that seems increasingly driven more by geopolitical competition than commercial returns.
James Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy. Bluesky: @beijingpalmer.bsky.social
