China has no better friend than Donald Trump in today’s America, and Beijing knows it
- Beijing’s latest trade-war move to walk back some of its punitive tariffs probably stems from a realisation that if Trump loses to the Democrats in the 2020 election, China can expect an even more hostile White House
“The problem isn’t the trade deficit, the problem is they’re stealing our intellectual property,” said Joe Biden, who’s currently leading the pack of Democratic contenders. “The problem is they’re violating the [World Trade Organisation]. They’re dumping steel on us.”
And even though Castro says he’s keen to end the trade war, he’s also looking to ratchet up the pressure against China over Beijing’s treatment of its Uygur minority in Xinjiang province.
If the fact that Trump is Beijing’s best friend in Washington wasn’t clear to President Xi Jinping before the most recent round of Democratic Party debates, it should be now.
Beijing has struggled to come to terms with Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip approach to diplomacy. So has every other American foe and ally, as well as many leading figures of Trump’s own Republican Party.
China freed American farmers held hostage in the trade war, while Trump gave up what amounts to a rounding error
But the economic stakes are highest for China, and it’s possible that Beijing has now decided that sweeteners might be better than a wall of resistance when it comes to the way forward with Washington, regardless of how much this will agonise the government’s propaganda machine.
State media said the move was a response to Trump’s decision to postpone an increase in the tariff rate on US$250 billion of Chinese goods from October 1 to October 15.
China’s response was asymmetrical. It knocked the tariff rate on soybeans, America’s largest single-commodity export to China in terms of value, down from 33 per cent to 3 per cent in exchange for a pledge by Trump to delay an increase on Chinese imports from 25 per cent to 30 per cent. China freed American farmers held hostage in the trade war, while Trump gave up what amounts to a rounding error.
Trump’s recent switch back to a friendly stance towards Beijing almost certainly factored into China’s decision to give American farmers a reprieve.
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But the realisation that Trump may be the only thing stopping an American foreign policy shift that would seek to align with every ally from London and Brussels to Canberra and Tokyo, in a bid to force China to open its markets, is probably the more pressing motivation.
Trump, who kicked the legs out from under the traditional free-trade-oriented centre of the Republican Party, will take his boot off their throats in due time, once he can claim victory in the trade war.
To be sure, the Democrats have stepped back from their hard-line rhetoric towards China before. Back in the 1990s, for example, presidential candidate Bill Clinton, who lashed out at then president George H.W. Bush for “coddling dictators from Baghdad to Beijing”, oversaw a huge expansion in Sino-US economic integration once he took office.
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But the political mood in the US about China has changed dramatically since the Clinton administration. In the eyes of the average American, China went from being inconsequential to a job-destroying, intellectual-property-stealing Leviathan.
That perception helped propel Trump into the White House, and the Democrats haven’t forgotten.
Robert Delaney is the Post’s US bureau chief
