Mr. Biden signed bipartisan legislation last year to ban TikTok based on national security concerns unless its parent company, ByteDance, sold it to investors not tied to a “foreign adversary.” ByteDance still owns TikTok, and the White House announced on Friday that it would be up to Mr. Trump to enact the ban. Mr. Trump said Saturday that he would likely give TikTok a 90-day reprieve from the ban, and the company’s chief executive plans to attend his inauguration. Nevertheless, American companies removed the app from online stores on Saturday night, hours before the federal law took effect.
Mr. Trump’s signature China policy in his first term was placing tariffs on some Chinese goods. Mr. Biden and his aides kept those while expanding policy along three major prongs: strengthening alliances and creating new security partnerships in the Asia-Pacific region; limiting technology exports to China; and jump-starting industrial policy in the United States.
In short, Mr. Biden sought to turn China policy into global policy.
During Mr. Biden’s tenure, already-tense relations plummeted when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, the de facto independent island that China claims as its territory, and a Chinese spy balloon drifted over the United States. But his team scrambled to restart high-level communications, including between the two militaries.
The United States and China “are competing, obviously competing vigorously, and yet still the relationship has an element of stability so that we’re not presently on the brink of a downward spiral,” Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, said in an interview in a West Wing conference room.
“That is a significant evolution over four years for how the relationship is managed on both sides,” he added. The Chinese Communist Party, he said, has now accepted the Biden team’s framing of “managed competition” for the relationship.
