Opinion | Hong Kong offers China a way out of Trump’s trade war: cool the protests crisis to ease the tariffs heat

As hawkish US advisers whip up the China hysteria, Trump unleashes yet more bellicose trade action, spelling disaster for the world economy

Given that little is expected of the US president, it falls to Xi Jinping to dial matters back, and Hong Kong is a good place to start

Reading Time:4 minutes

Published: 3:00am, 27 Aug 2019Updated: 3:23am, 27 Aug 2019

Given all that had gone on before, it seemed like nothing more than a sadly normal weekend in Hong Kong: tear gas, protesters surging to make various existentialist statements, police trying to beat down the challenge to their authority – more tear gas and more tears.

From all around the world, sympathy and concern. Ordinarily internationally clueless TV news programmes in America lead time and again with the troubles of Hong Kong. Why are so many people unhappy? Is their unhappiness all Beijing’s fault? Are the protesters of noble heart or are they spoiled-rotten millennial mercenaries? Can’t they all get along?

And why in Marx’s or God’s holy name is the China-US relationship suddenly so fractured? Inside the Washington-New York “swamp-way”, common sense has lost currency; in the dramaturgy of American foreign policy, China slides into centre stage as prime geopolitical suspect by appearing to fill the void left with the passing of the former “evil empire”.

These days, the Beltway (or, for the lack of a more apt term, the “swamp-way”) establishment offers the China syndrome analysis to those who talk up the military challenge. Former Defence Department and Rand Corporation think tank stand-outs such as Michael Pillsbury (The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower) are now the automatic go-to canonical commentators.

“Think of Pillsbury as our time’s Paul Revere,” proposes Gordon G. Chang, jaunty author of The Coming Collapse of China (2001). Or think of guys like Chang and Pillsbury as no more than restless enablers of an unnerving run of China hysteria.

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