Worse, the tariff feud has planted seeds of uncertainty about the country in the heads of every chief executive pondering where to place a new factory.Ĭhinese officials are less focused on tariffs than they maintain in public because they believe Mr Trump will lose his leverage over time, as he frets about the impact on American farm states and other places where he needs votes. They are less bullish because economic sentiment in China was fragile before the trade war. In private, they are both less confident and less focused on tariffs than they pretend. In public, Chinese officials call Mr Trump’s tariffs self-defeating and stress their country’s economic resilience. Chinese officials say that America failed to educate workers, allowed inequalities to yawn and never built social safety-nets to help victims of globalisation-and is now scapegoating China for those ills. Populist election victories in the West are ascribed to domestic failures in the countries concerned. Now American businesses are crying cheat, and demanding that trade rules designed for the rich world be used to keep China down. In China’s telling, American companies became accustomed to making fat profits in China, but see Chinese rivals catching them up and potentially setting global standards for future technologies.
Instead, they prefer to count the ways in which America is to blame for today’s tensions. But, when pressed, they struggle to explain what a useful agenda for future talks might be. They view relations with sour fatalism, and America as a sore loser.Ĭhinese experts talk wistfully of the scores of dialogues and mechanisms that used to underpin co-operation with America’s government before Mr Trump scrapped most of them. They do not see this changing soon-far from it. Where relations were once balanced between co-operation and competition, and China’s rise seemed on balance to benefit both countries, Chinese officials accuse Mr Trump and his team of seeking co-operation only when it serves a coercive, short-sighted “America First” agenda. Both countries have become quick to assume the other has malign motives. Now Chinese and American insiders talk of a downward spiral. Since Mr Trump’s tariff war with China began in 2018, President Xi Jinping and his underlings have accelerated efforts to make China self-sufficient in high-value sectors, creating supply chains that are “autonomous, controllable, safe and effective”, in Mr Xi’s words.įor decades Chinese officials have seen bilateral relations swinging, pendulum-like, between periods of hostility (notably during American elections, when candidates promise to shield workers from unfair Chinese competition) and a profit-driven willingness to engage. Long before Mr Trump was elected, China pursued such policies as “indigenous innovation” and “civil-military fusion”. Their domestic actions betray a different agenda: namely, to make Chinese companies dominant in high-value manufacturing sectors, and to hasten the day when they no longer depend on America for vital technologies.
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When addressing foreigners, China’s leaders talk piously of their commitment to free trade, market opening and globalisation. But officials and scholars in Beijing no longer bother to conceal their impatience and scorn for an America they view-with a perilous mix of hubris and paranoia-as old, tired and clumsy. Like a powerful juvenile warily sizing up a silverback gorilla-his age and status marked by the silvery fur on his back, and his mighty muscles and teeth-China knows that America can inflict terrible damage, as it wields still-unrivalled economic, financial and military might. Getting hairyĬhina does not seek a fight now. Increasingly, they can imagine a day when even America ducks a direct challenge, and the global balance of power shifts for ever.
Its leaders have a bleak worldview in which might makes right, and it is a fairy tale to pretend that universal rules bind all powers equally. It already senses that only one country-America-can defy Chinese ambitions with any confidence. China has spent decades growing stronger and richer. They will endure long after November, when American voters next choose a president. These began before Mr Trump came to office, and will continue even if an initial trade truce is made formal (Mr Trump says he will sign one on January 15th).
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However, behind that chilly, self-serving analysis lurks a series of angrier, more primal calculations about relative heft.
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