It was this increasingly self-confident China that greeted the Obama administration when it came into office in 2008. Unlike Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, Obama chose not to engage in bellicose rhetoric against Beijing during his election campaign. This was, in part, a reflection of his cautious intellectual temperament, but it was also because his foreign policy team had seen what happened with previously successful presidential candidates: after attacking their predecessors for being weak on China, an inevitable chill in the bilateral relationship
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