US President Donald Trump got several things right about China, and for that we should laud his efforts. He knew, or at least listened to the right adviser , when he decided that the “Washington consensus” – which assumed that closer economic integration with China would encourage Beijing to open its markets and provide greater opportunities for foreign companies – was wrong. That conclusion should have been obvious to Washington’s China hands long before Trump started his trade war with Beijing. Trump also seemed to understand that Beijing demands diplomacy but only respects power, probably because he has the same mindset. Has Trump ever been open to meeting in the middle when faced with a challenge? No. Just like his friend, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump equates concessions with weakness. So when former US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky criticised Trump last week for having no coherent China policy, her comments weren’t so much off base as they were anachronistic. They would have made much more sense when she was in charge of negotiating with Beijing. Back in the 1990s, the idea that China was aiming to move to a more reciprocal economic relationship with the US and the rest of the world was not so implausible. At that point, the country had already started to look quite different , economically, than it had just a decade earlier. China even appeared to be heading for more pluralism, politically, as the ashes of 1989 settled. Few people understood the long game that Beijing was playing, that the government was signalling an intention to join the rules-based order established by Washington, but actually intending to pursue a strategy based on technology transfer by any means necessary until it was too late to challenge its autocratic ways. As the game played out, few foreign firms got unencumbered access to the most valuable parts of the country’s economy and, after years of discussion about further economic reform, Beijing ultimately retained tight control over key industries. Speaking in Washington, Barshefsky criticised Trump’s phase one trade deal with Beijing, which largely centres on purchases of US goods, as an approval of China’s state-managed economy. “When we demand that these purchases be made, what we’re saying to China is: ‘Use your state enterprises, dictate to them what they have to buy, make sure they buy it’,” she said. “This is exactly what the US has fought against – not just with respect to China but with respect to Europe and many other countries – for the last 40 years.” But really, what do you expect, given that the Communist Party wrote into its constitution three years ago that “party, government, army, society and education – east and west, south and north, the party leads on everything”. Between Trump and Biden, China is likely to prefer the devil it knows There’s no negotiation tactic that will convince Beijing to allow market-oriented, commercial decisions to rebalance the trade relationship. When it comes to foreign trade, everything China does is political . So Trump may as well get what he can from China, with tactics that Beijing will respond to. His choices boil down to: a) fail to force economic and political reform on China, but sell more American goods to the country, or b) fail on both counts. If this analysis seems cynical, it is. Barshefsky is absolutely correct that the Trump administration has lacked a clear policy on China. By all accounts, the president’s geostrategic thinking is guided by whatever appears best for his personal brand in the moment. He has more respect for leaders aiming to undermine America’s national security than he has for those with any of the principles that Washington established for global trade and international engagement in the aftermath of World War II. But we need to acknowledge that his predecessors gave away far more to China than the US received, unless you consider cheaper electronics and apparel a win for America. Once Trump is out of office, Washington will need to play a long game of its own, together with Britain, the European Union and its other traditional allies, who all appear increasingly willing to demand from China changes that would align better with the understanding they had about the country’s direction when Barshefsky was at the negotiating table. Robert Delaney is the Post's North America bureau chief