US looking inward under Trump made room for China’s development, expert says
As US president reshapes Washington’s policy, Beijing may be left in an increasingly ‘complex and volatile’ world, Ni Feng says
Ni Feng, a researcher and former director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of American Studies, said the Trump administration’s “disruptive” overhaul of US diplomacy was sending the international system into a “more volatile and uncertain” phase.
This could leave Beijing facing an increasingly “complex and volatile” outside world, he warned during an event on January 15 organised by the Shanghai Development Research Foundation (SDRF), a non-profit advisory body.
FULL EVENT: Donald Trump’s ‘board of peace’ charter announcement
“The US strategic retrenchment and looking inward have created objective conditions for China to strive for development space,” Ni said, according to an excerpt of his speech published by the SDRF on its social media channel on Monday.
“The US … more tending to be utilitarian and restless, will also increase external uncertainty and risks,” he told the event.
“In the face of a United States that is ‘more restless, inward-looking and utilitarian’, the key for China is not to react passively to [America’s] policy changes but to enhance the certainty of [our] own development.”
Such concerns – recently stoked by Trump’s talk of taking over Greenland and the dramatic US abduction of Venezuela’s former leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife – were laid bare by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney last week.