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| President Donald Trump attends a bilateral meeting with China's President Xi Jinping during the 2019 G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters) |
| It’s cringe for an elder millennial to use Gen Z parlance, but there are times when a colloquialism just hits. That’s the case when gauging China’s evolving view of President Donald Trump’s second term. Beijing sees Trump’s disruptive actions — his gutting of institutions of U.S. soft power, his launching of trade wars against adversaries and allies alike, his steady eroding of trust in the U.S. alliance system — as acts of self-sabotage that need no Chinese prompting. Better for now, as Gen Z would say, to let him cook. After Trump moved to dismember the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which backed internationally oriented outlets such as Voice of America, Chinese state-made broadcasts took the place of U.S. programming on TV networks in countries as disparate as Indonesia and Nigeria. Trump, like a growing number of Republicans, viewed the media properties as suspicious fonts of “anti-American” liberalism. But Chinese propagandists exulted at the demise of these U.S.-funded news operations, which had, to varying extents, chronicled the state of pro-democracy movements around the world and provided space for dissident voices in countries where political freedoms are curtailed. “The Chinese people are happy to see the U.S. anti-China ideological fortress breached from within,” cheered Hu Xijin, former chief editor of the Global Times, a Chinese state-run, English-language newspaper, this year on social media. In a video circulating this month, Victor Gao, a former Chinese diplomat and vice president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, mused whether Trump may come to be remembered as an American Mikhail Gorbachev. The comparison to the late Soviet leader and famous author of glasnost and perestroika was not meant to be flattering: Gorbachev’s attempt at reforms, Gao said, precipitated the collapse of the Soviet empire and unleashed a “trauma” still being felt today. Gao suggested that by the end of the decade, Trump’s own attempt at reforms will have “fundamentally changed” both the United States and NATO, likely for the worse. Trump would not have made America “bigger, stronger, greater,” Gao said, but rather may have “led it astray, like Gorbachev.” | ||||||
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| A laid-off employee fights back tears while carrying a box of office belongings July 11 as she leaves the U.S. State Department. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images) |
| The fall of the Soviet Union isn’t the only historical parallel alive in Chinese discourse about the U.S. A host of Chinese commentators see in MAGA a whiff of China’s own Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, which saw myriad purges and the defenestration of ranks of the intellectual classes and political elites. “Mao unleashed the Red Guards to ‘smash’ the police, prosecutors, and courts, so that loyal revolutionaries could seize control of state machinery,” Zhang Qianfan, a constitutional law professor in Beijing, recently told CNN. “Trump brought Elon Musk and six young Silicon Valley executives into the White House under the banner of eliminating corruption, waste, and inefficiency — akin to the ‘Cultural Revolution Leadership Group’ entering the party’s central leadership.”
Proponents of “America First” say they see their reforms as rescuing the country from liberal torpor. They don’t necessarily wish for an end to U.S. primacy on the world stage. But they find in Beijing a confident Chinese leadership that won’t blink amid the weekly havoc unleashed by the White House. Trump has engaged in rounds of tariff threats with China, but has settled for periodic diplomatic truces, including the one that followed high-level talks last month in London. On Tuesday, he confirmed that he’s considering journeying “soon” to Beijing for talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Trump’s erratic approach has also played into China’s hands. “The disruption to bilateral trade triggered by Trump’s tariffs has left U.S. manufacturers scrambling and overpaying for materials,” wrote Zongyuan Zoe Liu, a senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “In implementing rare-earth export controls in early April, the Chinese government has discovered a powerful tool for inflicting pain on American businesses.” China, she added, may not want a trade war with the United States, but “it would rather decouple than kowtow to Trump.” Ali Wyne, an expert on U.S.-China relations at the International Crisis Group, said China is broadly pursuing three main lines of strategy in the face of Trump’s threats: It’s working to boost trade with other countries and parts of the world, in a bid to insulate itself from the effects of U.S. protectionist measures. It’s arguing in diplomatic channels and public propaganda that “America First” is not an aberration, but a feature of U.S. politics that will have negative consequences for American allies. And it’s finding “more momentum, more traction,” as Wyne put it to me, for the emergence of a 21st century international order that’s organized more around principles that suit Beijing and its political worldview. | ||||||
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| A guide shows guests around the Chinese tech conglomerate Xiaomi's EV factory in Beijing this month. (Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images) |
Various “initiatives” promulgated by Xi on development, security and cultural harmony have put forward a rosy Chinese vision of global cooperation and prosperity stripped of liberal ideals around universal rights and democracy. China’s position is gaining ground thanks to the shifts in Washington. “Beijing’s assessment right now is that the United States is dismantling, fairly systematically, the sources of its strength,” Julian Gewirtz, a China scholar and former Biden administration official, said in a recent interview. “The United States, in their view, is dismantling its alliance relationships and alienating much of the world,” Gewirtz told the Wire China. “It is dismantling aspects of the U.S. science and technology ecosystem, cutting funding to some of our great universities, and making it very unappealing, if not outright impossible, for foreign talent to come do research in those universities. And it is eliminating arms of U.S. influence around the world, from USAID to Voice of America. China’s view is that the United States is, in a sense, unilaterally disarming.” The blow to U.S. soft power and the damage to U.S. credibility among allies and other partners might be irreversible. “I am not sure if any other incumbent power in history has so rapidly and systematically attacked its own principal sources of competitive advantage,” Wyne told me. “If Trump’s current hostility to alliances continues and the administration keeps insulting, belittling, and even economically harming its long-standing partners, the United States is going to find the world an increasingly unfriendly place,” wrote Margaret MacMillan, a historian and professor emeritus at Oxford University. To be sure, China is not about to supplant the United States as a new global hegemon. Many Asian countries are not keen on embracing a Pax Sinica after decades of a Pax Americana. Europe, for all its new friction with the Trump administration, isn’t about to pivot toward Beijing; analysts expect Chinese-EU talks at a summit this week to be cagey and cautious. But on at least one key front — green technology — Trump has handed China a huge advantage in scrapping Biden administration funding for renewables and doubling down on fossil fuels. China is speeding down an open lane to become the leader in steering the world’s energy transition. It is, as economic historian Adam Tooze said in a recent podcast, “the biggest laboratory of organized modernization that has ever been or ever will be.” Tooze argued that the Americans have “dropped the ball” here and the consequences will be vast. “This is the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history,” he said. “This is really what the provincialization of the West really looks like.” | ||||||