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Macroscope | Why China might prefer dealmaker Donald Trump’s transactional stance to politician Joe Biden’s playbook
- While the Trump administration had no problem ‘haggling over the price of chickens’ with Beijing, Biden’s team seems focused on the re-establishment of a broader US negotiating position
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“My predecessor! Oh God, I miss him,” US President Joe Biden jokingly said of Donald Trump last week. But when it comes to trade relations, it will be China who will miss Trump. Beijing will find that dealing with Trump was a walk in the park compared to negotiating with the Biden administration.
Trump is a dealmaker, Biden is a politician. Such was Trump’s focus on securing a trade deal with China, at least according to his former national security adviser John Bolton, in his book The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, that the former US president refused to issue a White House statement on the 30th anniversary of China’s massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.
“Who cares about it? I’m trying to make a deal,” Bolton recorded Trump as saying. And a deal Trump made, but his transactional approach to trade negotiations with Beijing fitted China’s playbook well.
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In his memoir, A Promised Land, former US president Barack Obama writes of his own discussions with China’s then premier Wen Jiabao about perceived imbalances in the China-US trade relationship. Obama recalled that Wen suggested that “I just give him a list of US products we wanted China to buy more of and he’d see what he could do.”
“I felt like I was haggling over the price of chickens at a market stall rather than negotiating trade policy between the world’s two largest economies,” Obama added.
The Trump administration had no problem “haggling over the price of chickens”. Last year’s phase one trade deal included an itemised and detailed list of US goods that Washington wanted to sell and Beijing said it would try to buy.
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