BEIJING – In Chinese government offices and think tanks, universities andstate-run newsrooms, there is an urgent debate underway about what manyhere see as the hidden motive for Washington’s escalating trade war againstPresident Xi Jinping’s government: a grand strategy, devised and led byTrump, to thwart China’s rise as a global power.
“The Trump administration has made it clear that containing China’sdevelopment is a deeper reason behind the tariff actions,” said He Weiwen,a former commerce ministry official and now a senior fellow at the Centrefor China and Globalisation, an independent research group filled withformer bureaucrats.
These sentiments were echoed by many of the more than two dozen current andformer government officials, business executives, state-affiliatedresearchers, diplomats and state-run media editors interviewed for thisarticle. Most requested anonymity to speak their minds about sensitivematters.
A common suspicion ran through the conversations — that the tariffs arejust a small part of Trump’s plan to prevent China from overtaking theUnited States as the world’s largest economy. Several people expressedconcern that the two nations may be heading into a long struggle for globaldominance that recalls the last century’s rivalry between the United Statesand Soviet Union.
“The trade war has prompted thinking in China on whether a new cold war hasbegun,” said An Gang, a senior research fellow at the Pangoal Institution,an independent research group in Beijing whose experts include formergovernment officials. The dispute, he says, “now has military and strategicimplications” — reflecting concern among some in Beijing that tensionscould spill over into Taiwan, the South China Sea and North Korea.
There’s little visible sign so far from China’s opaque government that thetrade war has impacted Xi’s ability to control the levers of money and power
The general pessimism is a major shift among China’s elite, many of whomhad initially welcomed the rise of a US president viewed as a transactionalpragmatist who would cut a deal to narrow a $375 billion trade deficit forthe right price. Now, with tariffs on $34bn of goods already in effect andduties on another $216bn in the pipeline, a majority saw no quick fix to aproblem that is starting to rattle the country’s top leaders.
The turning point came a few months ago, when Trump put a stop to a dealfor China to buy more energy and agricultural goods to narrow the tradedeficit. Not only did that insult Xi, China’s all-powerful leader who hadsent a personal emissary to Washington for the negotiations, but itcrystallised a view in Beijing that Trump won’t quit until he thwartsChina’s rise once and for all.