It didn’t take long.
Within hours of President Joe Biden’s inauguration, his foreign policy team began to grapple with one of the government’s biggest challenges: China.
The United States classified as “unproductive and cynical” a series of sanctions that China imposed on Donald Trump officials who were stepping down at the time the inauguration was taking place.
“The imposition of these sanctions on inauguration day is apparently an attempt to play for party divisions,” Emily Horne, spokesman for President Biden’s National Security Council, told Reuters on Wednesday. “President Biden hopes to work with leaders from both parties to position America to overcome competition from China.”
China responded by criticizing the government that is leaving office and calling for healing and better relations between the two countries – even using a line from Biden’s inaugural speech.
“I believe that if the two countries work together, better angels in US-China relations can defeat the forces of evil,” Hua Chunying, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, told a news conference on Thursday.
In his speech emphasizing the need for unity to triumph over the division, Biden said on Wednesday: “Through struggles, sacrifices and setbacks, our best angels have always prevailed” – a phrase borrowed from Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address in 1861 .
The rhetorical exchange follows four years of worsening US-China relations, with Trump and his team members blaming China for the Covid-19 pandemic, using racist terms to describe the virus and criticizing Beijing’s treatment of Hong Kong protesters and their Uighur Muslim minority.
During that time, countries – the world’s two largest economies – also waged a damaging trade war.
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Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to Washington attended Inauguration of Biden with official invitation, a first, which may indicate that the new president will continue to increase Trump’s support for the self-governing island that Beijing claims to be part of China.
However, although he has signaled that he will maintain pressure on Beijing, Biden’s team must adopt a more traditional, diplomatic and multilateral approach than that of Trump.
China imposed sanctions on 28 Trump officials on Wednesday, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump’s commercial adviser, Peter Navarro, and Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services. The measures prohibit travel to Hong Kong, Macau or mainland China, and restrict any organization aimed at doing business there, according to a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China.
In his final weeks in office, Pompeo unleashed a flurry of measures against China and said on Tuesday that Beijing had committed “genocide and crimes against humanity” against its Uighur Muslim population.
China has repeatedly rejected allegations of abuse in the Xinjiang region, where the United Nations says at least 1 million Uighurs and other Muslims have been detained in camps.
Biden’s choice to succeed Pompeo, Antony Blinken, said on Tuesday that he agreed with Pompeo’s assessment. He said at his Senate confirmation hearing that “there was no doubt” that China represented the most significant challenge for the United States of any nation.
Reuters contributed to this report.
Isabel Wang contributed.