By Katrina Northrop, The Washington Post (c) 2024
China is bracing for an unpredictable four years when Donald Trump returns to the White House, with the potential for renewed tensions over trade and Taiwan, but also opportunities for Beijing to play a greater role on the global stage.
Even as Chinese leader Xi Jinping congratulated the president-elect on Thursday, analysts were warning of a return to the transactionalism and confrontation that defined Trump’s first term and launched a new era of hawkishness in Washington.
“A lot of people here, including the government, I think, are preparing for certain upheaval or storms, but nobody knows,” said Tang Shiping, an international relations professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, who released a computer model on Sunday that correctly predicted Trump’s win. “I don’t think anybody really understands or has a rough idea what Trump, in his second term, will be able to do.”
Some media outlets in China did, however, seize on one glimmer of hope: The possibility that Tesla CEO Elon Musk – who has been a major donor to and supporter of the Trump campaign, but also has strong business interests in China – could serve as a bridge. Some people on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of X, proposed that Musk could be the next U.S. ambassador to China.
“China would be happy to see him play a role in bringing the two countries to an understanding, there are basically mutually beneficial opportunities in working together,” said Wang Zichen, who writes the Pekingnology newsletter on Substack.
Xi on Thursday sent Trump a message of congratulations for his election victory.
“History teaches that China and the United States gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation,” Xi said in his message, according to state media. “A stable, sound and sustainable China-U. S. relationship serves the two countries’ shared interests and meets the aspiration of the international community.”
Trump’s first term in the White House was, however, far from consistent.
At the start, in 2017, he attempted to strike a trade deal with Xi, inviting the Chinese leader to his Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago and traveling to Beijing for an elaborate state visit. He often spoke of Xi in glowing terms, calling him a “friend” and “an incredible guy.”
All that changed in 2018, when Trump led a hawkish turn in U.S. policy on China, launching a trade war and slapping tariffs on roughly $360 billion in Chinese imports, as well as imposing sanctions on Chinese technology companies.
Then he blamed Beijing for causing the deadly outbreak of covid-19, which he called “the Chinese virus.”
Although President Joe Biden maintained many Trump-era policies toward Beijing, including tariffs on Chinese goods, he toned down the anti-China rhetoric and worked to restart bilateral channels of communication.
On the campaign trail this year, Trump has promised to double down on his harsh first-term economic policies, including threatening to impose 60 percent tariffs on all Chinese goods.
That makes it unlikely Trump and Xi will get off to a smooth start, analysts say.
“The U.S.-China relationship will increase in tension in the first 100 days,” said Ivan Kanapathy, a former National Security Council official focused on China who served in the Trump and Biden administrations. “There will be an acceleration of competitive actions,” he added, including tariffs, export controls and sanctions.
But Beijing is better prepared this time around.
China’s leaders have been trying to promote self-sufficiency and insulate the country’s economy from external risks like U.S. tariffs.
The nationalist news site Guancha said in a commentary published Wednesday that China should thank Trump because he has “strengthened our determination, resolve and ability to be self-reliant in critical fields.”
But these efforts will only go so far, and a new trade war could not come at a worse time for Beijing: Its economy is struggling to rebound from the pandemic and its ability to hit its 5 percent growth target is in doubt. The property sector is in crisis and unemployment has surged in the past two years, among the youth population.
“China has been preparing for a long time,” said Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, but another trade war would be hugely damaging.
“Given China’s very difficult internal economic situation right now, a renewed trade war or more comprehensive efforts to decouple would pose a much more severe threat to China’s economic competitiveness,” Zhao said.
After trying to inject new momentum into the economy with a stimulus package announced in September, China’s top legislature is meeting this week to discuss further ways to spur growth. An announcement could come Friday.
But Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for the Asia-Pacific region at the investment bank Natixis, does not expect the announcement to address the underlying issues or boost anemic consumer demand.
An insufficient stimulus package, coming on the heels of Trump’s reelection, will constitute “a very bad day” for China, she said. “They need to find other sources of growth, because trade will not make it,” she added.
Despite the tough trade talk, Trump has recently returned to underscoring his personal rapport with Xi. In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan last month, Trump boasted that he enjoyed a “great relationship with President Xi,” he said. “We got along very well, and they treated me better than anybody has ever been treated.”
Chinese leaders have learned that showing Trump utmost respect as “a very powerful leader who thinks highly of himself” can go a long way, said Wang,the Pekingnology newsletter author, who is also a research fellow at the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing think tank.“There is no other way of dealing with this,” he said.
Trump could return to a dealmaking approach.“He was an engager,” said Susan Shirk, a China scholar at University of California at San Diego. “His basic predilections were to operate that way, and to make a deal, to be transactional,” she said, predicting Trump may attempt to strike some type of economic deal in his second term.
Geopolitics is another unpredictable, but potentially beneficial, sphere for Beijing, especially if Trump returns to the isolationist foreign policy approach of his first term.
Analysts noted that a second Trump presidency may help China if he weakens relationships with American allies and leaves another vacuum in global leadership.
Zhao, at Carnegie, said that this could provide opportunities for China.
“China could hope to undermine American efforts to isolate China through a broader Western coalition,” he said. “China would certainly strive to establish China’s own image of a more responsible power in contrast to the declining American international standing. ”
Nerves are running high across the strait in Taiwan, a self-governing democracy that Beijing considers a runaway province and wants to control. There are concerns about Trump’s unpredictability.
At the end of 2016, after his election victory but before he became president, Trump spoke on the phone with then-president of Taiwan, the first contact between leaders of the United States and Taiwan since 1979 – and continued to throw decades of diplomatic protocol out the window at the start of his term.
But he also lashed out at Taipei. Trump repeatedly said Taiwan should be paying the U.S. more in return for its support. “We’re no different than an insurance company,” he told to Bloomberg News in July. “Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.”
Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te congratulated Trump on Wednesday, saying on X that the partnership, “built on shared values & interests” would remain a “cornerstone” for regional stability and prosperity.
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Vic Chiang in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.