The candidate for secretary of state of the next White House administration has vowed to continue outgoing President Donald Trump’s hardline position on China and expressed hopes of seeing the United States take in people who are fleeing Hong Kong.

Antony Blinken, the pick of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden to lead the Department of State, said on Tuesday that China posed the most significant challenge of any nation to his country.

“We have to start by approaching China from a position of strength, not weakness,” Blinken told a Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination when asked about his stance.

“A position of strength when we are working with, not denigrating, our allies … a position of strength when we are engaged and leading in international institutions, not pulling back and ceding the terrain to China to write the rules and norms that animate those institutions.”

Besides U.S.-Sino relations, the senators also questioned Blinken about how he would deal with issues regarding Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Washington should have acted sooner as “democracy was being trampled” in Hong Kong, he said.

“I’d like to see us be able to take in some of those fleeing Hong Kong, fleeing the repression, for standing up for their democratic rights.”

On Taiwan, Blinken noted that Washington had been upholding “a strong and long bipartisan commitment” based on the Taiwan Relations Act and the U.S.-China joint communiques. The new Biden administration would maintain the commitments to ensure that the island had the ability to defend itself against aggression, he added.

A Hong Kong democracy advocate in self-exile in the U.S. said that he did not expect the Biden administration’s approach to Hong Kong to change radically from the Trump stance during the next six months of presidential transition.

Sixtus Baggio Leung told Apple Daily that he had been meeting with new senators and sharing the Hong Kong situation. He believed that a proposed Hong Kong Safe Harbor Act could be approved later this year to help people who were suppressed by the authorities.

Beijing-loyal Hong Kong legislator Priscilla Leung, a member of the Basic Law Committee, said that current U.S. suggestions to take in Hongkongers did not violate the city’s Basic Law or national security legislation at this point.

Hong Kong residents had the freedom to enter and leave the city and were not bound by any regulations banning people from traveling to the U.S., she said. However, it remained to be seen if the U.S. would be helping Hongkongers to abscond, she added.

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