Real estate failures and lawsuits: did setbacks in China scar tough-talking Donald Trump?
US presidential candidate has failed to crack Chinese market over the years
As a US presidential candidate, Donald Trump likes to talk tough on China by threatening to start a trade war. As a businessman, he’s failed more than once to crack into the China market.
One failure was in real estate, when Trump’s short-lived partnership with China’s biggest property developer went nowhere, and he’s also failed to launch his hotel brand in China. Trump also lost a big lawsuit to Hong Kong property tycoons who helped him in the 1990s. His one major success in China was winning a legal battle banning a Macau restaurant operator from using the name “Trump”.
If one day he sits in the Oval Office, he will do what a US president is supposed to do
It’s not known how personally committed or involved Trump was in his conglomerate’s Chinese failures, and there could be many reasons the deals were thwarted. But analysts and researchers said Trump’s fruitless efforts to gain from a booming China market and shrewd Chinese business partners might have affected the Republican presidential candidate’s attitude towards China, America’s biggest trading partner and a growing geopolitical rival in Asia, as he vies for the most powerful office in the world.
Yuan Zheng, an American affairs expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the failed business forays might have given Trump a “bad impression of China”.
“We need to look at if these reasons are commercial or political – if it’s purely business, I don’t think it will affect his opinion of China that much,” Yuan said. “On the other hand, if it’s the investment environment or other policy-related reasons [that led to his failed business attempts in China], that may leave him with a bad impression of China.”