Americans will decide in a week whether a Democrat or Republican will become the 44th president of the US. China is keen in following this.
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China policy has been a major bone of contention in the past two U.S. presidential elections, especially after the end of the Cold War as the United States fundamentally needed to remap and redefine its security environment and national interests respectively.
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Former President Bill Clinton, when campaigning in 1992, vowed to sweep away repressive regimes from Baghdad to Beijing. President George W. Bush came into power in 2001 with the belief that China would be the United States�"strategic competitor." In the 1992 and 2000 elections, it was more relevant for Beijing to watch who would be elected in Washington, given the stark differences of the candidates�China policy.
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Beijing tended to lean toward the side of the governing party: it was Clinton who challenged the China policy of George H.W. Bush, and it was the latter’s son who was hostile to the China policy manifested in Clinton’s second term that emphasized engagement with China. When welcoming the then Chinese President Jiang Zemin to visit Washington in 1997, Clinton even called U.S. relations with China a "constructive strategic partnership toward the 21st century."
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Compared to the 2000 election, the salience of China as a contentious issue in the 2008 presidential campaign has been much less pronounced in the race for the White House between Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama.
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This demonstrates to the Chinese that, within the past decade, there has emerged a nascent bipartisan consensus on China in the United States: That with U.S. cooperation, China has successfully embarked upon economic reform and is effectively shaping Chinese institutions. When coupled to the success of the Beijing Olympics, these reforms have generated a great amount of Chinese enthusiasm and productivity, as well as wealth that enrich both Chinese and American.  China’s opening has made the country far more connected to the international community, both strengthening the nation while exposing its vulnerability due to increasing global interdependence, as evidenced in the ongoing global financial chaos.
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Sino-U.S. relations are stabilizing, and it has been less critical to base Chinese assessments on the ideology and personality of the candidates. Â After all, Beijing and Washington have managed to overcome the fall out from the collision between a U.S. Navy EP-3 Reconnaissance aircraft with a Chinese jetfighter in 2001. Â President Bush has since visited China four times including his most recent participation in the Beijing Olympics. Â Yet Beijing is still keenly observing U.S. electoral politics as the policy priorities of the different presidential candidates may still diverge.
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The United States is now China’s number one export destination; China’s exports to the United States in the first six months of 2008 totaled $116.79 billion, up 8.9% from the same period last year. Furthermore, China’s export volume to the United States stood at $232.7 billion in 2007, representing an increase of 14.4% over the same period in 2006.
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In peacetime, the Chinese government will first consider domestic economic development, measured primarily at this stage by production and export, though often at the cost of environmental and ecologic degradation. The United States faces immense economic volatility, especially with the sub-prime mortgage crisis coupled by the weakening dollar, leading to collapse of various financial bonds.  Due to globalization, China’s economy is now increasingly intertwined with the rest of the world, in particular with the United States.  A decline in the U.S. economy would undercut America’s ability to consume, hence reducing its demand to import from China.
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Senator Obama appears firm in advocating a value based international trade system, urging negotiations with the EU on a trade arrangement that will take labor and environmental factors into account.  Obama has suggested revising NAFTA to allow similar considerations. Though he has not said much about China, Obama has indeed indicated that his administration will "use all the diplomatic avenues available to seek a change in China’s currency practice" to balance U.S. economic relations with China.  Overall, Senator Obama appears to take a tougher position on China regarding issues of trade, currency, and environment/climate as well the protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs).
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Senator McCain has also stressed the need to keep China committed to international trade rules, protecting IPRs, reducing tariffs of manufacturing industries, and honoring the promise for a market- oriented currency exchange rate. In the meantime, he has noted that to assure U.S. leadership, America shall seek international cooperation rather than isolation, and global free trade rather than national protectionism.
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Whether Americans elect Senator McCain or Senator Obama as the next president of the United States, there is likely to be less volatility in bilateral relations and fewer concerns in Beijing that there will be any major policy shift in U.S.-China policy compared to previous elections.