For decades, Donald Trump has described the US-China relationship in apocalyptic terms.
China is a “rival in its ambition to dominate Asia,” he wrote in his 2000 book The America We Deserve. It wants to “beat us and own our country,” he tweeted in 2011. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” he said of Chinese trade practices during a May 2016 campaign rally. “It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world.”
Yet since Trump became president, his view seems to have shifted dramatically. The more he has spoken with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the more pro-China he has sounded. And by the time he visited Beijing for the first time, in November, Trump was projecting stunning optimism about the possibility of closer ties between Beijing and Washington.
“In the coming months and years, I look forward to building an even stronger relationship between our two countries — China and the United States of America — and even closer friendships and relationships between the people of our countries,” Trump said during a November press conference in Beijing. “The Pacific Ocean is big enough to accommodate both China and the United States.”
Even for Trump, a politician famous for rapid policy shifts, the turn is whiplash-inducing. China bashing, particularly on trade and American jobs, has been one of the most consistent and defining elements of Trump’s worldview for more than two decades. On the campaign trail, his attacks on China were persistent and obsessive. He threatened to retaliate against allegedly unfair Chinese trade practices by passing a 45 percent tariff on Chinese-made goods, a move that would have sparked a massive trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
Yet neither this tariff nor any other major anti-Chinese trade policy has become reality. Trump has not taken any significant steps to counter Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, nor has he punished China for maintaining economic and diplomatic support for North Korea, two problem areas he referenced during the campaign. US-China relations under Trump have, in fact, mostly grown warmer — culminating in November’s lovefest in Beijing.
Experts on China and US foreign policy see the dramatic shift, at least in part, as being triggered by Trump’s preoccupation with North Korea.
“Trump is willing to temporarily set aside some of these economic issues [with China] in order to try to put more pressure on North Korea,” says Bonnie Glaser, the director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
But there’s also a deeper logic at work. In many ways, Xi — an authoritarian leader of a dynamic economy that dominates global manufacturing — is the kind of leader Trump can admire and even see himself negotiating with.
“The dominant theme of the president’s self-image, to which we have been exposed for decades, is that he regards himself as a consummate dealmaker,” said Paul Musgrave, a scholar of foreign policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “Trump seems to most often return to the theme that the Chinese drive a hard bargain but that they can be dealt with.”
How long this Damascene conversion lasts, or whether it produces anything good for America, remains to be seen. But for now, one thing is abundantly clear: A presidential candidate who attacked China in harsher terms than any before him now seems more comfortable with Beijing than any of his predecessors.
How Trump turned from uberhawk to China dove
When one examines Trump’s musings on international politics for the past 30-odd years, in both his writing and his public appearances, there’s one consistent theme: The world is a zero-sum place. If an agreement or policy benefits another country, it hurts America — and vice versa.
In 1987, for example, Trump spent about $100,000 to place full-page ads in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe that condemned America’s trade agreements and alliances as sucker deals.
“For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States,” the ad states. “The world is laughing at America's politicians as we protect ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need, destined for allies who won’t help.”
As the years went on, Trump came to believe that the worst of America’s many “bad deals” were made with China. In his dozen-odd books and countless TV interviews, Trump emphasized the notion that China is both a strategic competitor and a job thief, hollowing out America due to cheap wages and an undervalued currency giving it unfair export advantages.
“If we don't get smart quickly, China will destroy our country,” he said in a 2010 Fox News interview. “I would love to have a trade war with China. Because if we did no business with China, frankly, we will save a lot of money.”
After he started running for president in the summer of 2015, he made his vow to strike back against China’s unfair trade practices a central tenet of his campaign. His two biggest policy speeches of the election — an April 2016 address on foreign policy and a June 2016 address on jobs — painted China as the central villain.
“Our president has allowed China to continue its economic assault on American jobs and wealth, refusing to enforce trade deals and apply leverage on China necessary to rein in North Korea,” he said in the April speech. “We have the power over China, economic power, and people don’t understand it. And with that economic power, we can rein in and we can get them to do what they have to do with North Korea, which is totally out of control.”
Early in his presidency, it seemed like Trump might turn this rhetoric into policy action. During the transition, he spoke directly with the president of Taiwan — a shot at China that no previous American president had been willing to take. In March, he blasted China on Twitter for failing to stop North Korea’s nuclear development. It seemed like the first meeting between Trump and President Xi, on April 6, would be brutally awkward.
Yet it wasn’t. After the meeting, Trump said he would abandon plans to label China a currency manipulator — a formal punishment for Chinese trade policies that he vowed repeatedly to implement during the campaign trail. He entirely changed his tune on North Korea after a short chat with China’s leader.
“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power [over] North Korea. ... But it’s not what you would think.”
After that, the president’s view of China only appeared to grow warmer. In June, Trump thanked China for its help on North Korea — despite China doing very little, in concrete terms, to rein in the North’s nuclear development:
While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 20, 2017
When he visited Beijing in early November, he couldn’t contain his praise for the country. He tweeted repeatedly about his “beautiful” reception, and bragged about his “great chemistry” with Xi. Perhaps most stunningly, he turned away from his decades-old position that China was responsible for destroying America’s economy.
“I don't blame China. After all, who can blame a country for taking advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens?” Trump said, instead blaming previous US presidents "for allowing this trade deficit to take place and to grow."
By the end of 2017, it became clear that Trump hadn’t changed the US-China relationship. It was Trump who had changed.
The many reasons behind Trump’s transformation
So why did this shift happen? Experts see a number of intersecting reasons, making it difficult to isolate just one cause. But there are, nonetheless, a few factors that clearly played a role in the shift to a more pro-China stance.
When you look at the timeline of Trump’s changing tone on China, it’s hard not to see his April 6 meeting with Xi as a decisive turning point. Before, his rhetoric toward Beijing sounded as bellicose as it did during the campaign; afterward, it started to get softer.
The budding friendship between Trump and Xi appears to have profoundly shifted Trump’s view of US-China relations. Why the two men have gotten along so well isn’t clear; reporters aren’t allowed in their private meetings. But it makes some sense given Trump’s apparent admiration for strongmen across the world, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte (both more thuggishly violent than Xi).
“The president has long made it clear that he prefers governing systems that favor action over inaction, since he seems to continually confuse an absence of expressed dissent with unity and strength,” Musgrave said. “By that measure, it's unsurprising that he said nice things about Xi Jinping.”
From China’s point of view, Xi’s deft personal diplomacy has dovetailed nicely with the growing centrality of the North Korea crisis to the Trump administration’s foreign policy.
North Korea’s nuclear program progressed rapidly over the course of 2017; Pyongyang tested both its most powerful bomb and its longest-range missile to date. As the issue rose in public prominence, preoccupying both the US government and TV news, handling North Korea — and not the US-China trade deficit — became his No. 1 priority for the region.
You might have expected pre-2017 Trump to use North Korea’s provocations an opportunity to bash China even further, given his generalized hostility to Beijing. But his personal connection with Xi has led him to try a different, more diplomatic tack. The result is an emerging policy of cooperation with China rather than clashing with it.
“Trump is trying to play up his relationship with Xi Jinping, and is willing to give him more time to address the economic problems in the relationship while trying to extract from him more willingness to put pressure on Pyongyang,” Glaser said.
We have no guarantee that Trump’s softer tone on China will stick. The president is notoriously mercurial; there are any number of different developments that could cause him to sour on Xi and China more broadly.
But until then, we’re left with a president who has gone from China hawk to China dove — and done so because of a concerted attempt by Beijing to cultivate his friendship. Give Xi credit: He figured out what he needed to do to win over Donald Trump, and he’s done so in less than a year. Imagine what the future will bring.