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
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.
Relax America, China is not intent on world domination
But if the Chinese economy is a major slice of the global economy, how much can anyone gain when it contracts? We know that when the huge American economy caught a cold, the rest of the world got the flu. Why would something like that not happen were China, now nearly as huge, to feel under the weather?
Now another Republican Party president is receiving similarly poisonous counsel from economic advisers who may know economics but don’t know their China from their Arabia. Our confused president needs to run the other way from these advisers before they blow up the world economy like the Bush crowd blew up Iraq.
Read it here first, fellow Americans: it’s not in the game plan for the Chinese to strafe Hawaiian beaches someday. Competition from the Chinese will be economic. America, rooted in a culture of competition, simply needs to compete with vigour to retain viability, not cower behind ideological shibboleths.
My recent book on China offered the title, Yo-Yo Diplomacy. The idea: the China-US relationship has been prone to jerky ups and downs like a child’s yo-yo. The title’s implicit premise is not at all fatalistic: it is that what goes down, after all, must come up. But is that right?
Over lunch in Los Angeles last month, Chinese diplomats, who’d read the book (in English), quipped that it looked to them as if the yo-yo string might be broken – and staying on the down slope was the new normal. No more up in our yo-yo relationship?
In 1651, an English pessimist determined that mankind was inherently limited in its ability to make wise choices and behave civilly. This was Thomas Hobbes, his book was Leviathan, and his depressing pitch was that, without a strong political hand, life would become “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.
That is precisely where this world, with all its nuclear weaponry and incapacity to get a grip on big problems, may well be heading, unless China and the US can get a firm grip on their relationship.
China calls Trump’s trade war escalation a ‘strategic mistake’
Tom Plate is vice-president of the Pacific Century Institute and the distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University