During the 2016 US presidential election campaign, candidate Donald Trump made much of what he saw as an imbalanced US–China relationship. How has he conducted himself as president in this policy area?
We can say with certainty that President Trump has exhibited all his known eccentricities and idiosyncrasies in his dealings with China. As a first-time politician, he was primarily fixated with America’s annual trade deficit hovering over US$300 billion for years according to US government statistics. As an entrepreneur, Trump is profoundly transactional and unmoored in any political ideology. During the campaign, he publicly broached the idea, among an assortment of anti-China assertions, of using Taiwan as a card. So, when he talked to Tsai Ing-wen, President of Taiwan (officially known as Republic of China) over the phone days after winning the election, Beijing was of course concerned. Soon, however, he learned that as president his first foreign policy challenge was North Korea, and on that subject Beijing’s cooperation was indispensable. As a result he quickly paid lip service to the ‘one China principle’ in order for Beijing to agree to ever stricter sanctions on North Korea. He even openly floated the prospect of China solving the North Korea problem for him in exchange for a compromise on trade. But as soon as he emerged from the talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore in June 2018 and declared victory, he pulled the trigger on the trade war.
Trump’s trademark unpredictability and the chaotic manner in which his administration is run caused a great deal of confusion and concern in Beijing during the course of the trade negotiations. Particularly as Chinese officials had a hard time telling who among Trump’s senior advisers actually spoke for him and whether the verbal agreement the two sides had struck would be accepted by Trump. Now with the US in the throes of the coronavirus epidemic, Trump’s xenophobia is often on display as he and other senior US officials insist on calling it the ‘Chinese virus’ or ‘Wuhan virus’. This demonstrates how the past three years of dealing with the Trump administration have been a deeply frustrating experience for Beijing.
Has US foreign policy in recent years surprised the Chinese leadership?
Yes, and that’s exactly the point I made in my International Affairs article. Not only did Chinese officials and established scholars grossly underestimate the deep frustrations with China among America’s policy, business and academic elites, they also had a false sense of stability in the relationship that they attributed to the Sino-US economic interdependence. They also misunderstood Trump the individual, believing that he could be appeased and mollified by Chinese ‘buy buy buy’. As is clear by now, his administration has been ramping up more pressure on China across the board and there are China hawks across the political spectrum.
How did the Chinese leadership respond to Trump’s election victory?
Ahead of the 2016 US election, the majority opinion within the Chinese foreign policy establishment could be summarized as ‘anyone but Clinton’. Many held deep antipathy toward former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for her hawkish China approach and her stance on human rights and democracy. They preferred Trump, thinking that as a one-note politician he’d be much easier to deal with. The election result was therefore widely perceived as good news in China
