impossible for President Trump to reunite the United States, as the political landscape of American politics has been fundamentally altered.71 For Zhou Xinyu, the election of Trump suggests that the United States has adopted a new way of thinking both about itself and about its relations with the world.72
While Trump’s victory has reinforced many Chinese criticisms of the decay of American democracy, there are serious concerns in China’s policy circles about the prospect of dealing with a Trump administration. Shortly after his victorious election, President-Elect Trump fired a volley of bewildering comments on Sino-US relations and broke diplomatic protocol between China and United States for the first time in four decades by having a phone conversation with Cai Yingwen, the regional leader of Taiwan. Later he went further by publicly challenging the “One-China” policy, the bedrock of China-US relations.
Trump’s outrageous comments about China-US relations immediately generated backlash from the Chinese government as well as heated discussions among China’s general public. On December 14, 2016, the Huanqiu network conducted an online survey on Chinese perceptions of Trump as well as the future of Sino-US relations.73 Of the 8,800 Chinese participants in this survey, nearly half of them believed that President-Elect Trump’s recent actions were “jeopardizing Sino-U.S. relations and China must respond.” About three quarters of the participants expressed skepticism about Trump’s goal to ‘Make America Great Again.’” The survey also demonstrated a significant change in Chinese perceptions of Trump only one month after his election, as many respondents thought that Trump was not as friendly to China as expected, while 44 percent of the respondents confessed that they did not expect him to be friendly to China in the first place. As for the trajectory of China-US relations in the Trump era, about half of the respondents were “pessimistic” and about 13 percent of them predicted that the relationship would “completely head for the worse.” On the issue of how China should respond if Trump continues to challenge the “One-China policy,” one fifth of the respondents thought China should impose sanctions on America and break off cooperation on major international issues. Regarding Trump’s campaign pledge to “Make America Great Again,” over three quarters of the respondents flatly said, “he couldn’t [do] it.” Furthermore, about 77 percent of the respondents agreed that the American democratic system had failed to elect an honorable and presentable leader. The percentage of respondents who thought Trump would be an outstanding leader was only about 6 percent.
The findings of the survey demonstrate the Chinese people’s growing dissatisfaction and opposition to the incoming Trump administration, if not the emergence of a new anti-Trump movement in China. It also seems to suggest the early end to an “imagined honeymoon” between China’s policy circles and the Trump administration. Of course, China still has good reason to believe that the foundation of China-US relations remains structurally solid, as it is becoming increasingly adept in handling China-US relations despite the negative influence of America’s domestic politics. As one Chinese scholar argues, the prospects of China-US relations might depend more on how well China, as an important economic and strategic partner of the United States, can help realize Trump’s agenda.74
China-US Relations under Trump: An Early Assessment
When Donald Trump won the 2016 US presidential election, few Chinese observers would suspect that merely one and a half years into his presidency, the two nations had already been entangled in an unprecedented trade war. As far as China is concerned, every US president since the normalization of bilateral ties have followed a pattern of appearing to be tough on China during elections (and even in their first few months in office), before backtracking on their aggressive rhetoric and changing the tune of their China policy. However, Trump might prove to be a true outlier in this regard, as he set out with great determination to translate many of his radical campaign pledges into policy, especially when he slashed billions of dollars’ worth of tariffs on China in order to correct the perceived imbalance in China-US bilateral trade.
Perhaps more significantly, when President Trump officially labelled China a revisionist power and a strategic competitor to America in his administration’s National Security Strategy, he had brought new meaning to the decades-old policy conundrum in Washington that has confronted every American president since Richard Nixon, that is, how to define US-China relations. Since the days of the Nixon administration, America’s China policy has aimed to steer China out of its isolation and integrate it into the global market economy so to avoid conflict between the established superpower and the emerging power. As China grew rich, it was reasoned, it could be peacefully integrated into the current international framework built by America and the Western powers from the rubbles of World War II. This liberal consensus of foreign policy thinking dominated America’s strategy with China for the past four decades or so. Now, it appears that consensus is all but over and increasingly replaced by a new consensus that it is time for America to stand up to China. As President Trump fervently lamented in his National Security Strategy, “For decades, US policy was rooted in the belief that support for China’s rise and for its integration into the post-war international order would liberalize China. Contrary to our hopes, China expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others.”75
In other words, changes in the Trump administration’s China policy appear to reflect the growing consensus within the Washington foreign policy establishment towards changes in China’s foreign and domestic politics since President Xi Jinping ushered in a “new era” of reforms for China in 2012. There is no doubt that American perceptions of China changed dramatically in the last decade, and changes in mutual perceptions might converge to push China-US relations over the edge. The bilateral relationship is now “entering the third phase of relations, where we’re once again defining China principally as a strategic competitor both in economics and security,” commented David Lampton, professor and director of China Studies at Johns Hopkins—SAIS in an interview.76 Chinese experts, many of whom believe that the two countries have already entered an era of growing competition and even strategic rivalry, echoed such pessimistic views.
Looking back on the election, China was optimistic that the Trump administration would not disrupt the existing framework of the world’s most important relationship, and bilateral economic relations would improve while security tensions simmer down. After all, Trump was perceived in China as a practical businessman who would be flexible enough to strike deals with Beijing based on pure bargaining rather than values-laden strategies. However, the ongoing trade war, in which the US government imposes a battery of tariffs against billions’ worth of Chinese goods while restricting Chinese investments in high-tech areas, has set Trump’s China policy onto a different and more belligerent path that would have far-reaching implications beyond the economic realm. For one thing, Trump’s trade war is widely interpreted as an offensive tactic against the Chinese government’s “Made in China” 2025 program, which is central to President Xi Jinping’s vision to transform China into a technological superpower as well as a key step to realizing China’s national rejuvenation.
This explains why the current trade disputes between China and the United States is more than just a spat over US-China trade imbalances, intellectual property rights, or market restrictions. On a much deeper level, the trade standoff between these two countries reflects an escalating political, economic, and even military rivalry between the status quo power and its most likely challenger. It also represents a clash between two great powers with divergent political and economic systems, markedly different worldviews, and perhaps conflicting national aspirations. Therefore, no matter how the current brinkmanship over trade imbalances will play out in the short term, the long-term trajectory of China-US
