Chinese elites expect trouble from the incoming US president. Their opinions vary, however, as to how much damage China will suffer during a second Trump presidency. Expectations range from Trump being a disaster to Trump being a net positive for China’s interests.
Chinese analysts agree on several general points, including the following: Regardless of who is president, Americans widely view China as an economic and political competitor if not an adversary. Tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea will continue to be potential flashpoints in the bilateral relationship. And another US-China trade war is likely.
During the election campaign, Trump said he might impose tariffs of 60% or higher on all Chinese goods imported into the US. From here, however, there is a considerable and perhaps surprising divergence of views.
The first Trump presidency is an inescapable reference point. After the trade war came the acrimony caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, when Trump used the term “China virus” and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the virus came from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Trump’s White House produced national security documents that used much tougher language about China than those the Obama Administration wrote. Pompeo went so far as to call on the international community to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party’s rule over China. Trump’s National Security Adviser Robert C O’Brien said assisting China’s rapid economic development was the “greatest failure of American foreign policy since the 1930s.”
It is, therefore, natural that many Chinese analysts expect Trump II to begin where Trump I ended. Qinghua University professor Da Wei fears “US-China relations could descend into freefall” under Trump.
Beijing University professor Wang Dong believes “a new Cold War” is “more likely than not.” US policy will be “will be tougher, more extreme, more unpredictable and more confrontational,” says Xin Qiang, a professor at Fudan University.
Beijing University professor Jia Qingguo expects that the Trump administration will accelerate US economic de-coupling from China. Shi Yinhong, a former professor from Renmin University, thinks “US-China relations are likely to reach the worst state short of a major military conflict.” He believes Trump’s government wants to “overthrow the Chinese regime.”
A specific worry stems from the positive vibes of Trump and others in Trumpworld toward Russia. Chinese dissident Yuan Hongbing, former Beijing University Law School dean, reports that “a Chinese military think tank” believes the Republican Party wants to appease and befriend Russia and withdraw US military commitments from Europe so America can focus on resisting China.
Huang Jing, a professor at Shanghai International Studies University, similarly worries that the US would “join hands with Russia to counter China.” If so, “China’s security environment would deteriorate greatly”—a huge understatement.
Other Chinese analysts, however, have more optimistic expectations. They foresee that with Trump in the White House, US-China tensions will be manageable and Beijing will make gains at America’s expense.
Hu Wei, a former professor at Shanghai Municipal Party School, emphasizes that “Trump is a businessman. He can be negotiated with. . . . Seeing an opportunity for profit, he will forget about moral principles.”
Furthermore, says Hu, influential mega-billionaire Elon Musk will “urge Trump to improve relations” with Beijing because Musk’s Telsa business is heavily invested in China. Hu predicts Trump will damage America’s international prestige, weaken US global leadership, make the US less competitive, and derail US attempts to outcompete China, but will not unite with Russia against China or encourage Taiwan independence.
He might even “make a deal [with China] on the Taiwan issue.” In sum, Hu believes Trump “will do something, whether consciously or not, that is objectively beneficial to China.”
Qinghua University fellow Zhou Bo writes that Trump will make the US more unpopular globally and alienate allies, and his attempts to influence China through tariffs will prove unsustainably painful to Americans; so “why should China worry?”
Zhu Feng, a researcher at Nanjing University, believes that despite a continuing US commitment to “containing” China, efforts to restructure supply chains to avoid China and a likely second trade war, “it is difficult for the US to decouple from China.” He expects Washington and Beijing will work out a solution.
Yan Xuetong, a dean at Qinghua University, believes that compared with either current President Joe Biden or defeated rival Kamala Harris, Trump is less likely “to provoke a third military conflict [i.e., after Gaza and Ukraine] in East Asia,” and more willing to accept that the US is no longer the dominant country either globally or in the Asia-Pacific region.
Fudan University’s Wu Xinbo argues that Trump’s disinterest in joining multilateral trade agreements increases the likelihood that China could get into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was originally a US-led grouping intended to counter-balance Chinese global economic power.
Many Chinese observers conclude from Trump’s expressed aversion to getting into foreign wars that he would not try to instigate a Taiwan Strait war (as PRC propaganda claims the Biden administration is doing). Zhu thinks it “unlikely that the Taiwan issue would get out of control” because“both China and the US are aware of the red lines regarding Taiwan.”
An unnamed “national security expert at a state-run Chinese think-tank” reportedly said if the US stops supplying weapons to Ukraine, as many expect Trump will do, “We can tell the Taiwanese people, you can’t count on the Americans.”
Some Chinese also expect Trump will inadvertently help achieve Beijing’s goal of moving Europe away from alignment with America and closer to China. Says Niu Chun-bao, chairman of an asset management company in Shanghai, “Trump’s approach of being [an] enemy with the whole world may make some left-wing regimes in Europe disappointed, and this development may lead to a de-escalation of trade tensions between China and Europe.”
According to Fudan’s Wu, “If it is not withdrawing” altogether, “the United States will significantly reduce its investment in NATO” under Trump.
Chinese recognize a difference between Trump himself and some of the top officials surrounding him. Trump seems naturally inclined to conduct US foreign policy as a series of transactions in which America seeks immediate economic gains and avoids losses.
Some of Trump’s chief advisors, however, advocate organizing US policy around the goal of thwarting what they see as Chinese ambition to make the world less hospitable to US prosperity, security and values.
Chinese elites are relieved that former Trump administration officials O’Brien and Pompeo will not serve in the Trump II cabinet. Nevertheless, Trump is placing other China hawks in key positions.
Zhu Junwei, a director at the think tank Grandview Institution in Beijing, argues that Trump’s nomination of Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state is “a nightmare come true” for China. Rubio, who is under sanction from Beijing and banned from traveling to China, helped write legislation that forbids the importation of products made in Xinjiang.
He has also sponsored several pro-Taiwan bills in Congress. “I strongly reiterate,” he has written, “my support for Taiwan as an independent democracy and strong ally of the United States. The US must do more to strengthen ties with Taipei in the face of China’s increasingly aggressive actions and rhetoric.” Incorrectly calling Taiwan a US “ally” is especially provocative in Beijing’s eyes.
Mike Waltz, Trump’s appointee for the national security advisor position, calls China“the most existential threat to the United States, to liberty around the world and to a free world order that we have ever faced.” He advocates “addressing the threat of the CCP and arming Taiwan NOW before it’s too late” and says the US strategic effort must “shift to the Pacific.”
The pessimists among Chinese analysts fear that Trump will allow the strategic counter-China agenda of some of his key staff to drive US policy.
The optimists, on the other hand, are banking on their beliefs that Trump is averse to getting into a war in Asia, doesn’t care to compete with China for international leadership, will not be able to tolerate the pain of another trade war with China and is willing to make an economic deal that will stabilize bilateral relations, even if he makes fearsome threats to gain leverage.
Trump’s first term featured fluctuation between the deal-making approach and the hawkish strategic approach. For example, Trump said he held off from levying sanctions on China over the mass incarceration of Muslim Chinese in Xinjiang because he wanted Xi to agree to a bilateral trade deal. But Trump also signed into law the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, and his State Department announced that Chinese government policy toward the Uyghurs constituted “genocide.”
Trump’s government banned US companies from selling components to Chinese telecommunications corporation ZTE over national security concerns, but a few weeks later Trump lifted the ban as a favor to Xi. While his government framed China as an adversary, Trump consistently called Xi his “friend”—and still does—as if to leave the door open to a grand bargain.
Similarly, going into Trump II, all of the factors identified by both the optimists and the pessimists will likely be in play, with no one of them consistently dominating policy formulation.
Denny Roy is a senior fellow at the East-West Center, Honolulu.