On the campaign trail last year, President Donald Trump talked tough about imposing tariffs as high as 60% on Chinese goods and threatened to renew the trade war with China that he launched during his first term.
But now that he's back in the White House, Trump appears to be seeking a more nuanced relationship with the country that both Republicans and Democrats have come to see as the gravest foreign policy challenge to the U.S. China is also a major trading partner and an economic powerhouse, and it has one of the world’s largest military forces.
“We look forward to doing very well with China and getting along with China,” Trump said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in comments that suggested Beijing could help end the war in Ukraine and reduce nuclear arms.
As he moves forward with plans to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico on Feb. 1, Trump has not set a firm date for China. He’s only repeated his plan for a much lower 10% tax on Chinese imports in retaliation for China's production of chemicals used in fentanyl. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was “very much still considering" raising tariffs on China on Feb. 1.
Trump, who spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping days before taking office, seems to be showing restraint and bowing to a more complicated reality than he described while running for office. Speaking of potential tariffs on China in a recent Fox News interview, he said: “They don’t want them, and I’d rather not have to use it.”
Liu Yawei, senior adviser on China at the Carter Center in Atlanta, said Trump has become “more pragmatic.”
“The signaling, at least from the election to the inauguration, seems to be more positive than has been expected before,” Liu said. “Hopefully, this positive dynamic can be preserved and continued. Being more pragmatic, less ideological will be good for everyone.”
A Chinese expert on American foreign policy acknowledged that there are many “uncertainties and unknowns about the future" of U.S.-China relations. But Da Wei, director of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, also said Trump's recent change in tone offers "encouraging signals.”
In his first term, warm relations were followed by a trade war
When Trump first became president in 2017, Xi and Trump got off to a good start. Xi was invited to Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. A few months later, he treated Trump to a personal tour of the Palace Museum in the heart of Beijing, only to see Trump launch the trade war the following year.
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The U.S.-China relationship soured further over the COVID-19 pandemic, and it hardly improved during President Joe Biden's administration, which saw a controversial visit to the self-governing island of Taiwan by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a Chinese spy balloon aloft over U.S. territory.
Biden kept Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods and intensified the economic and technological rivalry with export controls, investment curbs and alliance building.
Now it will be up to Trump's top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to help chart a new path for the second term.
During his confirmation hearing, Rubio said China has “lied, cheated, hacked and stolen” its way to global superpower status “at our expense." He called China “the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.”
Hours after he was sworn in, Rubio met foreign ministers from Australia, Japan and India, sending signals that he would continue to work with the same group of countries that Biden elevated to blunt China’s expanding influence and aggression in the Indo-Pacific region.
Yet Rubio, who was twice sanctioned by Beijing and is known for his hawkish views on the Chinese Communist Party, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U.S. should engage with China because “it's in the interest of global peace and stability.”
In a Friday phone call, China's veteran foreign minister issued a veiled warning to Rubio, telling him to behave. Wang Yi conveyed the message in their first conversation since Rubio’s confirmation.
“I hope you will act accordingly,” Wang told Rubio, according to a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement that included a Chinese phrase typically used by a teacher or a boss warning a student or employee to be responsible for their actions. Rubio agreed to manage bilateral relations in a “mature and prudent” way, the ministry said.
Members of Congress have noted Trump's seemingly softer attitude toward Beijing.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, wants to ensure "that Trump does not let China off too easy.” She urged the president to act now on measures that have won broad bipartisan support, including closing a tariff loophole on low-value packages, reviewing outbound investments and setting up a domestic industrial policy agenda.
Beijing seeks opportunities and stays ready to play tough
Beijing is seeking opportunities to create more breathing room in its relations with a U.S. president known for his transactional style. Chinese leaders are betting on engaging with Trump directly when his Cabinet members and advisers appear to hold clashing views.
Trump "is the most important person above all those different voices, and he can at least set the tone of future policy,” Da said.
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The Tsinghua professor expects Trump and Xi to meet at some point. Effective communication channels will be crucial, Da said, to keep differences from spiraling out of control, as they did in Trump's first term.
“The two presidents can have a good starting point. That’s very important,” he said. “But then we need to set up some mechanisms to let the cabinet-level members talk to each other.”
That may explain Beijing's friendly overture at the start of the second Trump administration. In response to Trump's inauguration invitation, Xi sent a special representative.
Beijing has also signaled a willingness to be flexible on the future of TikTok, which Trump sought to ban during his first administration. But he has now come to the social media app's rescue, offering more time for its Chinese-based parent company to sell and downplaying TikTok’s national security risks.
After Trump said he preferred not to use tariffs on China, the Chinese Foreign Ministry echoed that trade and economic cooperation between the two countries are mutually beneficial.
But Beijing is also ready to play tough, if necessary, after learning a lesson from Trump's first term.
Over the past several years, Beijing has adopted laws and rules that allow it to retaliate quickly and forcefully to any hostile act from the U.S. In its toolbox are tariffs, import curbs, export controls, sanctions, measures to limit companies from doing business in China and regulatory reviews aimed at inflicting pain on American businesses and the U.S. economy.
Miles Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute, said Trump is now “more nuanced, and more focused, towards China.”
“He’s keeping his eyes on the prize, which is to maintain U.S. supremacy without risking open and avoidable confrontation with China, while perfectly willing to walk away from the negotiation table and play the hardball,” Yu said.