Trump has attacked China this week accusing it of ‘one of the greatest thefts in world history’ but what is behind his attacks?

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump accused China on Tuesday of "one of the greatest thefts in the history of the world" and said he could fix the problem by drawing on the negotiating skills laid out in his 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal.

"I do great with the Chinese," Trump told an audience at a campaign rally in Dubuque, Iowa. "And they're great people. The problem is their leaders are too smart for our leaders. I'm a big believer in free trade. I like free trade. But it's not good if we have dummies."

The China lines, which amplified an argument that Trump has been making to large audiences for weeks, drew forceful applause. But they were more than crowd-pleasing barbs dropped into an extemporized stump speech.

The attacks on China, and the analysis attached to them, are undergirded, in the somewhat mysterious construct that is the Trump presidential candidacy, by actual, albeit sketchy, economic policy proposals. And analysts suggest these could threaten a trade war with China that would rearrange the global economy, with serious ramifications for the US.