China’s Xi Jinping Is Secretly Terrified by Trump’s Recent Moves, Desperately Wants to Avoid Escalation
Even modest exposure to East Asian history should teach American students to respect — and never to underestimate — the Chinese people.
President Donald Trump, the keenest observer of human nature and staunchest defender of American interests at least since President Ronald Reagan, has reportedly recognized China’s subtle-yet-hostile approach to undermining those interests in recent decades and, therefore, has prioritized dealing with that nation accordingly, which has Chinese leaders scrambling to find a strategy that will counter Trump’s bold moves.
In fact, Chinese President Xi Jinping has begun looking to the past for answers, per The Wall Street Journal.
“Soon after Donald Trump won the presidential election in November,” Journal reporters Lingling Wei and Alex Leary wrote in a fascinating story published on Wednesday, “Xi Jinping asked his aides to urgently analyze the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.”
Indeed, for a variety of reasons, that represents one of the most eye-popping opening lines to an article in recent memory.
The word “urgently” told the whole story. It signified Xi’s recognition of Trump’s return to the presidency as harbinger of an epochal shift in U.S. foreign policy.
And that has every reason to make the Chinese president nervous.
After all, the liberal globalist order established under President Bill Clinton through the World Trade Organization has resulted in American jobs shipped overseas and American towns hollowed out as trans-national corporations reaped the benefits of free trade since the end of the Cold War, and that system has allowed China to amass a $295 billion trade surplus with the U.S., the largest of any American trading partner.
Trump, of course, has pledged to rectify that problem by putting America first. That means negotiating or renegotiating trade deals. It also means using tariffs, as the president did earlier this week when he targeted China, Canada and Mexico.
Moreover, the Chinese economy has severe fundamental weaknesses. It could not thrive, for instance, without the centralized control and cheap labor that Communist governments have always exploited.
Thus, according to Americans who have met with senior Chinese officials, Xi has expressed alarm over Trump’s return.
In fact, since the president’s victory in November, Chinese officials have campaigned for substantive engagement with the new administration. But they have failed.