The Republican Party’s heavy losses in the US midterm elections may look like good news for Beijing. However, Chinese commentators warn that Donald Trump, now forced to compromise with a Democrat-controlled Congress, could turn more hawkish on China – particularly over Taiwan matters and chip export controls – in his final two years.
In the November 3 vote, the Democrats seized control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, leaving Trump to face a hostile Congress until his term ends in January 2029. Vice President JD Vance blamed the defeat on the war with Iran, a war that has pushed up oil prices, and Trump later agreed with his assessment.
The setback comes two weeks before Trump is due to travel to Shenzhen for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit on November 18-19, where he is expected to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping. The Kremlin said in September that it had discussed a trilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who will also attend.
While some Chinese netizens had hoped for a Republican defeat ahead of Wednesday’s results, almost all Chinese commentators changed their tone on Thursday after a day of careful thought. They told readers not to celebrate and to drop the simplistic belief that China gains whenever its rival stumbles.
They said the Democrats’ win will not soften Washington’s China policy, as containing China is now a bipartisan consensus. They said US technology export controls and investment curbs against China, already written into law, will stay and may even tighten as the two parties compete to look tougher on Beijing.
Pundits also said Trump may try to end the wars in Ukraine and Iran, refocus on the Asia-Pacific and approve more arms sales to Taiwan.
“Many people in China cheered when they saw Trump suffer a heavy defeat and become a lame duck. They think the US is in chaos and that pressure on China has eased. This logic feels satisfying, but it oversimplifies a complex matter,” a Shandong-based writer using the pen name “Weichang” says in an article published on Thursday.
“The Democrats and Republicans have been arguing over how to block China, not whether to block it,” he says. “In the short term, the US will be too busy with its own problems. But in the long term, its containment of China may become more systematic.”
He says the technology war will shift from the US president’s impulsive decisions to permanent laws passed by Congress. He says the Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware (MATCH) Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in April, would force US allies to align their export controls and target Chinese chipmakers such as Huawei Technologies and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC).
He adds that the Democrats will also repair the alliances that Trump has strained, repackaging curbs on China as a joint defense of democracies. He adds that Trump may not want to escalate tensions, but Congress will keep pushing bills on Taiwan, Xinjiang and chip export controls that force him to take a stand.
“The two US parties have long been united in containing China, with no disagreement between them. Democratic control of Congress will not ease the blockade at all, but will only change Washington’s tactics for containing China,” says Jiang Tao, a Guizhou-based columnist. “The Republicans favor unilateral pressure, while the Democrats prefer to work through alliances. Their methods differ, but their goal is the same.”
“The biggest danger is that the Taiwan Strait is entering a more volatile and complex period of high risk. Of all modern US presidents, Trump has cared the least about Taiwan. He would readily sacrifice the island for his own interests,” he says.
He says that Trump, now a lame duck, will very likely overhaul his Taiwan stance after this crushing defeat and play the Taiwan card hard to win back conservative support. He says the Democrats will play up a crisis in the Taiwan Strait while the Republicans will apply aggressive pressure, pushing tensions around Taiwan to unprecedented levels.
In January this year, Congress approved a US$14 billion arms sale to Taiwan, including air-defense missiles. But the White House later ordered agencies not to move the package forward, as Trump sought to open trade talks with Beijing and avoid upsetting Xi ahead of his May trip.
After that summit, Trump described arms sales to Taiwan as a negotiating chip in his dealings with China. Xi then visited the White House in September. The package, which cannot proceed until Trump formally sends it to Congress, remains on hold.
Trade truce first
After a full-blown trade war in April and May 2025, Washington and Beijing agreed to de-escalate their trade conflict. The Trump administration wanted to sell more previous-generation graphics processing units (GPUs) to China and buy time to stockpile rare earths and critical minerals. Beijing wanted to avoid heavy US tariffs, giving Chinese manufacturers time to relocate production and explore new markets.
In 2026, the two sides kept up trade talks despite the sanctions and export controls they imposed on each other. In general, China tried not to provoke Trump and agreed to most of his requests, including increasing critical mineral supplies and buying 25 million tons of US soybeans. In return, the two sides agreed in September to extend their trade truce, which was due to expire on November 10, by two months to January 10, 2027.
“The US midterm elections are a domestic affair,” Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a regular press briefing on Wednesday. “China stands ready to continue working with the US to uphold and deliver on the important common understandings reached by the two heads of state, enhance communication, properly manage differences, expand cooperation and build a constructive relationship of strategic stability on the basis of respect, fairness and reciprocity.”
“Objectively, Trump’s election setback is bad news for China. We now face not a less capable rival but a clearer-eyed one,” says Yanbian, another Shandong-based writer. “The question for the US now is not whether to contain China, but how to contain it more efficiently.”
“Trump’s approach is to go it alone, use brute force and make allies pay for protection. The Democrats’ approach is to build coalitions, write the rules and reshape supply chains. With the Democrats back, US competition with China will shift from crude isolation to systematic containment,” he says.
He says the US can change its president, its ruling party and its rhetoric, so China should look not at what US officials say but at Washington’s budgets, bills, export control lists and military deployments, and at its allies’ purchases. He says that what China should fear most are three illusions:
- that China can take a break while the US is consumed by infighting;
- that a new US president will soften Washington’s China policy;
- that technology problems will solve themselves as long as China’s gross domestic product (GDP) keeps growing.
He says China must keep developing its own technology, as there is no shortcut and no room for wishful thinking, and master every part of the supply chain, from chips and lithography to industrial software, operating systems, and precision manufacturing.
In January 2025, the Biden administration issued the AI Diffusion Rule, dividing the world into three tiers with different access to Nvidia’s high-end GPUs. However, the Trump administration scrapped it in May 2025, letting Southeast Asian data centers rent computing power to Chinese firms, and later approved sales of Nvidia’s H20 and H200 chips to China. The MATCH Act is still awaiting a floor vote in Congress.
“If Trump can maintain his influence and keep his China policy unchanged, Beijing will certainly welcome it. What China cares about most now is whether the progress made in high-level contacts and trade talks with the US can be sustained,” said Chen Liang-chih, an associate research fellow at the Division of Defense Strategy and Resources of Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR).
He said that, with the APEC summit approaching, the key to future US-China relations will be whether the two sides can deliver on the agreements and commitments reached at summits and Trump-Xi meetings over the past year, and keep moving forward.
Read: Taiwan to criminalize Nvidia AI chip smuggling to China
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Hahaha……
US has no effective bargaining chip anymore.
Here is an overestimation of a defective and declining client, and underestimation of the combined China and Russia.