[Donald Trump’s second term in office is getting off to a good start for China. The new US President has so far refrained from acting on his threat to slap hefty tariffs on China, expressed interest in visiting the Chinese capital in the months ahead, and gave a 75-day reprieve to Chinese-owned app TikTok. Trump even signaled he would look to dilute a law requiring the company to divest its American business or be banned.
This sends a strong signal that the returning president is willing to talk and cut deals with China. At least for now. This is welcome news for Beijing, which has been bracing for a tumultuous period in US-China relations as Trump stacked his cabinet with China hawks and campaigned on levying high tariffs on all Chinese imports to the US.
“China realizes that’s there an opportunity to negotiate with Trump,” said political scholar Liu Dongshu of the City University of Hong Kong. “And a better US-China relationship is more important to China than to the United States… so China is eager” to engage.
Stakes are high for Beijing, as a tit-for-tat trade war like the one during Trump’s last administration would hit China’s ailing export-reliant economy at a bad time. Chinese leaders have been keen to seize on the opportunity to soften Trump’s hard line.
Xi called for a “new starting point” in US-China ties during a call with Trump days ahead of the inauguration and dispatched Vice President Han Zheng to the US capital to attend the swearing-in ceremony, the seniormost Chinese official ever to attend such an event.
Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang said China wants to “promote balanced trade,” not “surplus” with the world – striking a note that appeals directly to Trump’s chief complaint about the relationship between the two largest economies.
But China’s policymakers are also under few illusions about how quickly the tenor of US-China relations could change, and are likely calculating how to use the current breathing room to negotiate with the “art of the deal” president in the months ahead.
Looming over this period is a “phase one” trade deal brokered during the last Trump administration. The 2020 deal marked a truce in a tit-for-tat trade war that saw Trump heighten or impose tariffs on hundreds of billions of Chinese imports to the US. Now, that deal is part of a larger probe of US-China economic and trade relations that Trump called for in an executive order on his first day in office.
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