Donald
Trump and China on dangerous collision course, say experts
Report
says ties between the two nuclear-armed countries could deteriorate
into an economic or military confrontation
Tom Phillips in
Beijing
Tuesday 7 February
2017 03.30 GMT
A highly combustible
cocktail of Donald Trump’s volatility and Xi Jinping’s
increasingly aggressive and autocratic rule threatens to plunge
already precarious US-China relations into a dangerous new era, some
of the world’s leading China specialists say in a new report.
For the last 18
months a taskforce of prominent China experts, some of whom have
dealt with Beijing for more than 50 years, has been formulating a
series of recommendations on how the incoming White House should
conduct relations with the world’s second largest economy.
The group’s
report, which was handed to the White House on Sunday and will be
published in Washington DC on Tuesday, says ties between the two
nuclear-armed countries could rapidly deteriorate into an economic or
even military confrontation if compromise on issues including trade,
Taiwan and the South China Sea cannot be found.
Winston Lord, a
former US ambassador to China and one of the report’s authors, told
the Guardian: “I’m not totally despondent. I think we can get
through this. But I think right now because of China’s policies and
the uncertainties of Trump we are in the most uncertain situation
certainly since the Tiananmen Square massacre.”
Orville Schell, a
veteran China scholar who was one of taskforce’s chairs, said he
was fearful about Trump’s apparent inclination to light a bonfire
under decades of US policy towards China.
“We have a weird
situation – and actually an incredibly dangerous one – because
Trump is so unpredictable,” he said. “This is America’s
Cultural Revolution. Just as Mao overthrew the party establishment
and unleashed his red guards, Trump is going after the foreign policy
establishment elite and he is unleashing his populism.”
Even before his
shock election last November, Trump had indicated he would take a far
harder line towards what he called “the bad China”.
“There are people
who wish I wouldn’t refer to China as our enemy. But that’s
exactly what they are,” Trump wrote in his bestselling campaign
manifesto, Great Again: How To Fix Our Crippled America.
To China’s dismay,
Trump – who has yet to speak with Xi Jinping since his inauguration
– has done little to tone down such rhetoric since his election
victory.
On television and
Twitter he has accused Beijing of militarising the South China Sea,
manipulating its currency and hampering attempts to rein in North
Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un.
Trump has also
angered Beijing by hinting he could offer greater political
recognition to Taiwan, a democratically ruled island that China
claims as part of its own territory.
The taskforce’s
74-page report describes threats to overturn the US’s decades-old
“One China” policy towards Taiwan – under which it does not
dispute Beijing’s claim to the island – as “exceedingly
dangerous” and possibly the most imminent danger to US-China
relations and regional stability.
“In China’s
universe if you don’t agree on ‘One China’ it’s like being in
an evangelical church and having someone scream out: ‘There is no
God!’ It’s blasphemy,” said Schell.
The report also
warns of a gathering storm in the South China Sea, where Trump has
accused Beijing of building “a massive fortress” in order to
tighten its grip over the strategic waterway through which $4.5tn
(£3.4tn) in trade passes each year.
It says China’s
increasingly assertive actions in the region – which include
placing sophisticated weapons systems on artificial islands –
coupled with growing domestic nationalism risks setting the US and
China on “a dangerous collision course”.
Last week Trump’s
chief strategist, Steve Bannon, was reported to have claimed war
between the US and China in the South China Sea was inevitable within
five to 10 years.
Members of Trump’s
team have criticised Barack Obama’s “weak” posture in the
Asia-Pacific and called for an increased military presence there as
part of a “peace through strength” strategy intended to push back
against China.
However, the report
cautions the White House against a “short-sighted” military
buildup that it says would further inflame tensions.
“If China believes
the United States is simply bent on containing it militarily, then
Beijing would lose any motivation to moderate its conduct and might
instead double down on preparations to fight and win in a showdown,”
it says.
Schell said there
was growing consensus among US academics, politicians and even
businesspeople that since the 2008 financial crisis an emboldened
China had been insufficiently challenged over protectionist trade
practices, increasingly aggressive foreign policy moves and egregious
human rights abuses. However, following Trump’s unexpected victory
the report’s raison d’être changed.
“We had assumed
the US government was in a steady, solid state and needed to adjust a
little. And suddenly along comes Trump and threatens to rip up the
playbook and, weirdly, China began to look a little bit as if it were
more in the steady state,” Schell said.
Rather than simply a
set of policy recommendations, then, the report became a direct
appeal to Trump’s administration not to allow relations with
Beijing to spiral out of control.
Lord, who was part
of a secret 1971 mission to China with Henry Kissinger that paved the
way for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations, said he was
alarmed at how in just a few days Trump had “taken a sledgehammer”
to longstanding US policy on Asia.
He described the
president’s decision to abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
as “a geopolitical and economic disaster for the United States”
that would damage Washington’s credibility in the region and boost
China’s clout.
Trump’s “truly
baffling and stupid phone call” with the Australian prime minister,
Malcolm Turnbull, was also a blow. “Australia is one of our most
faithful allies through history, and now in Asia, and if you are
worried about the South China Sea … this is not the way to start,”
Lord said.
Evan Medeiros,
Obama’s top adviser on Asia and another of the report’s authors,
said he felt “somewhere between uncertain and very worried” about
Trump’s plans for US-China ties.
He cautioned the
Republican against trying to challenge Beijing on such a wide range
of issues. “You can’t do everything simultaneously. You can’t
pick a fight with China on Taiwan, on trade, on North Korea and the
South China Sea at the same time. It simply won’t work. You’ll
just end up in a big fight with China that doesn’t produce anything
for the United States.”
The report’s
authors identified some glimmers of hope. While several virulently
anti-China figures had found their way into Trump’s administration,
other more moderate voices were also appearing.
Schell said the
secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, had made some “reasonably
reasonable” remarks about China, and he was also encouraged that
Matt Pottinger, a former Marine and Wall Street Journal Beijing
correspondent, was expected to become the White House’s chief
adviser on Asia.
“There’s some
interesting people that have been picked and will be picked – there
are also some real wackjobs,” he said.
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