Biden's passing of baton to Harris works in Beijing's favour

China has refrained from publicly rooting for any US presidential election candidate, but analysts are quietly heartened by the prospect of Ms Kamala Harris replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate.

- Yew Lun Tian and Michelle Ng

Asked to comment on news of the likely candidate swop, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a daily news conference on July 22: "The US election is an internal affair of the United States. I won't comment on it."

Chinese analysts familiar with Beijing's calculus told The Straits Times that although the government bears no ill feelings towards Mr Biden, it would probably view the latest turn of events favourably as it means the Republican candidate, former president Donald Trump, is now less certain to win November's race.

"Harris taking over Biden will greatly boost Democrats' chances of beating Trump. Trump is China's worst enemy," said Professor Shi Yinhong, an expert on US-China relations at Renmin University of China.

"Those who say Trump is better for China suffer from amnesia. Look at what Trump did to China during his four years as president," he told ST.

Bilateral ties between world's top two economies started on a good footing in the early days of the Trump administration in 2017. Beijing had hoped it would be easier to deal with him, as he had a reputation for making transactional deals rather than being ideologically against China.

But Trump soon turned forceful in waging a trade war against China, and imposed sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports in line with his slogan: Make America Great Again.

In his re-election bid, Trump promised to tune up the trade war, threatening on July 18 to put tariffs of "around 100 to 200 per cent" on Chinese-made cars during his Republican Party's presidential nomination acceptance speech.