After four years of Joe Biden, China’s leaders would likely be relieved to have Donald Trump back in the White House.

Compared with his predecessor, Biden has operated quietly. Trump launched a trade war; slapped tariffs on Chinese imports; and infuriated Beijing by referring to the coronavirus as “the Chinese Virus,” blaming the Chinese Communist Party for its spread, and even at times humoring theories that the party may have played a role in its creation.

But Biden has hit China harder than Trump ever did. Armed with a more determined foreign policy, he has inflicted acute damage on the country’s economy and geopolitical ambitions, from which China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has struggled to recover. “A Biden-led U.S., probably from the Chinese perspective, looks like a more formidable challenge,” Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., told me.

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By comparison, from Beijing’s point of view, haggling with Trump over tariffs or exchanging bombastic rhetoric was a mere nuisance. Trump’s withdrawal from American global leadership encouraged Xi to promote China as a more responsible world power. The chaos of the Trump presidency—the administration’s inept response to the pandemic, the violence of January 6—allowed Chinese propagandists to cast the United States as a superpower in decline. Biden’s diplomatic reengagement has made spreading that narrative harder. In response, Xi has become more hostile to Washington. He has routinely resisted dialogue with the Biden administration and become more determined to upset the U.S.-led world order. He has grown more desperate and isolated as a result. Opposed by most of the world’s major powers, Xi has thrown in his lot with the pariah states Russia and Iran in an attempt to build an anti-American coalition to challenge U.S. primacy.