At the beginning stages of his run for President, Donald Trump oddly fixated on China. He pronounced the word ‘China’ itself with the frenzy of a racist, and he focused on the nation in the context of international trade. Trump accused China of currency manipulation and unfair trade practices. In one heated claim, he accused China of ‘raping‘ the U.S. via its trade policy.
How did this situation arise? What’s the relationship between the U.S. and China? Where is that relationship headed?
Obama, Trump, and Trade
Trump’s comments smell more than a bit of opportunism. He saw Obama and the Democrats as weak on issues of international trade. Democrats long promised to deal with the negative effects of globalization, and they long failed to do so. Trump created his entire political brand in no small part in response to this background.
Trump pitched his message at people who made money in the manufacturing sector, but typically as white-collar workers in that sector. The only blue-collar workers he directly targeted were retired ones. These count as cases under a general rule: Trump speaks about and to different groups of people. He relies on audience prejudices to get away with blatant falsehoods.
International trade made for some very promising uses of this strategy. Trump spent years complaining from the sidelines without any need to act, and he did this from about 2010 to 2016. This hardly impressed U.S. workers, who had bigger problems to worry about. But it greatly impressed white-collar people who desperately want to think about themselves as blue-collar.
Tariffs
In theory, Trump wanted to use tariffs to displace China from its increasingly important role in the global supply chain. He started his presidency with it, and he ramped up the actions in 2020 as part of his coronavirus inspired re-election strategy. In practice, Trump uses tariffs to nudge or coerce companies to stop making products in China or using Chinese parts.
In the first round of tariffs in 2017-2018, Trump imposed tariffs on a random collection of Chinese goods. And then China imposed more strategic tariffs on the U.S. in response. Aside from rising aluminum and steel prices, not much happened. While perhaps rhetorically successful with people who don’t actually work in manufacturing, the ‘benefits’ were hardly worth the costs to Trump.
More recently, Trump has pursued a multi-lateral approach against China involving other regional governments. There’s talk, for example, of forming an ‘Economic Prosperity Network‘ to balance China’s role in the global supply chain. Will that work? We’ll see.
The broader point is that many Americans are hurting, and the Democrats don’t have much to offer them. As a result, Trump saw the opportunity, and he took advantage of it. The U.S. left, on the other hand, wants to promote a new vision. It wants to recognize that people are suffering but offer them a path grounded in solidarity rather than nativism or racism.
China as Economic Power and Regional Hegemony
Lest the point be lost, China occupies a huge role in the supply chains of U.S. companies. The U.S. International Trade Commission helpfully documents more than one such role. The broad overview? China tends to handle production and assembly work for well-established products, and it tends to handle different sorts of work for less-established ones. Its manufacturing industry handles work already standardized.
China also plays an increasingly large role in consumer markets. As it develops economically, its roughly 1.5 billion people form a larger part of the market for U.S. goods. Take the film industry as an example. Over the course of the last 20-30 years, China has leapt from a non-factor to one of the world’s largest film markets. Films get approved or canceled based on how well they’ll do on the Chinese market. Chinese preferences change film scripts, and Chinese investors play a large role in production and distribution.
Xi Jinping
The driving force behind this is, of course, the size of the Chinese economy and China’s economic and political role on the world stage. China now has the world’s second largest economy by GDP. And by purchasing power of its currency, it has the largest. At the same time, quick development leads to spiking inequality, as we saw in a very different way in Syria. This breeds popular resentment among the Chinese public. And, combined, these things produce creeping authoritarianism in its political system.
In 2018, the National People’s Congress voted to eliminate term limits for President Xi Jinping. Along the way, it placed his name and official ideology in the party’s constitution. In effect, this places him in the Chinese pantheon alongside Chairman Mao Zedong, among others. None of this guarantees Jinping will be a lifetime President, but it certainly clears a path for him. It also represents the closest China has come in decades to having an official personality cult.
That said, there’s a great deal of internal resistance to Jinping within China. And there’s a great deal of remaining unrest. Xi’s moves roughly match authoritarian trends found in places as disparate as Brazil, Russia, and the U.S.
China and the U.S.
American discourse around China is distrustful at best and racist at worst. Americans worry China is ‘taking over’ the world economy and positioning itself to dominate the U.S. This is unwarranted, racist fearmongering, but it’s driving Trump’s strategy. As a matter of fact, China has a long way to go before displacing the U.S. as the world hegemon.
In the short-term, in fact, China carries some potential to disrupt U.S. hegemony and advance a more pluralistic world. In the abstract, this carries benefits. China might balance U.S. power in East Asia and the Pacific, thereby relieving some countries of U.S. domination.
In the longer term, allowing a country with authoritarian tendencies as strong as China’s to influence international markets and governments becomes dangerous. U.S. domination hasn’t been a good thing, but Chinese domination would be no better. In some respects – particularly around issues of free speech – it could be worse.
If there’s an underlying lesson here, it’s the importance of balance – a pluralism of some sort – in the world system. Pluralism provides the only effective basis for people organizing their own democratic systems. Domination by a hegemon – any hegemon – is rarely conducive to the democratic spirit.
