By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-03-10 21:36:35 | Updated at 2025-03-12 20:43:21
1 day ago
While US President Donald Trump has spared no bombast even when dealing with long-standing American allies, he has been curiously reticent regarding an expected target of his rhetorical ire: China. If anything, Trump has gone out of his way to appease America’s chief rival on the global stage. He invited President Xi Jinping to his inauguration and has signalled the possibility of a new trade deal, not to mention a willingness to allow TikTok’s presence in the US market.
What explains Trump’s relative pivot away from hawkishness towards China? With the usual caveat that the Trump administration has a flair for the unpredictable, I would point to three chief factors: unpleasant memories from Trump’s first term, the well-publicised sway of tech mogul Elon Musk and the lesser-known input of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Combined, they provide reasons one might expect a more pragmatic and compromising tone from Trump as he seeks a new and improved China strategy.
There’s no denying the first Trump administration wreaked havoc on US-China relations. He claimed that China “ripped off the United States like no one has ever done before”. He told Americans that China “raided our factories, offshored our jobs, gutted our industries, stole our intellectual property and violated [its] commitments under the World Trade Organization”.
In sum, he took US-China relations to their lowest point since Richard Nixon toured the Great Wall on his landmark trip to Beijing as US president.
But there was a problem with Trump’s approach: it didn’t actually work. Take the 25 per cent tariffs he levied on China while professing that “trade wars are good, and easy to win”. They backfired as China simply launched retaliatory tariffs and reined in US exports.
