Even modest exposure to East Asian history should teach American students to respect — and never to underestimate — the Chinese people.
President Donald Trump, the keenest observer of human nature and staunchest defender of American interests at least since President Ronald Reagan, has reportedly recognized China’s subtle-yet-hostile approach to undermining those interests in recent decades and, therefore, has prioritized dealing with that nation accordingly, which has Chinese leaders scrambling to find a strategy that will counter Trump’s bold moves.
In fact, Chinese President Xi Jinping has begun looking to the past for answers, per The Wall Street Journal.
“Soon after Donald Trump won the presidential election in November,” Journal reporters Lingling Wei and Alex Leary wrote in a fascinating story published on Wednesday, “Xi Jinping asked his aides to urgently analyze the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.”
Indeed, for a variety of reasons, that represents one of the most eye-popping opening lines to an article in recent memory.
The word “urgently” told the whole story. It signified Xi’s recognition of Trump’s return to the presidency as harbinger of an epochal shift in U.S. foreign policy.
And that has every reason to make the Chinese president nervous.
After all, the liberal globalist order established under President Bill Clinton through the World Trade Organization has resulted in American jobs shipped overseas and American towns hollowed out as trans-national corporations reaped the benefits of free trade since the end of the Cold War, and that system has allowed China to amass a $295 billion trade surplus with the U.S., the largest of any American trading partner.
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Trump, of course, has pledged to rectify that problem by putting America first. That means negotiating or renegotiating trade deals. It also means using tariffs, as the president did earlier this week when he targeted China, Canada and Mexico.
Moreover, the Chinese economy has severe fundamental weaknesses. It could not thrive, for instance, without the centralized control and cheap labor that Communist governments have always exploited.
Thus, according to Americans who have met with senior Chinese officials, Xi has expressed alarm over Trump’s return.
In fact, since the president’s victory in November, Chinese officials have campaigned for substantive engagement with the new administration. But they have failed.
Michael Pillsbury of the conservative Heritage Foundation explained.
“They are kind of desperate,” Pillsbury said of the Chinese. “Their economy is in trouble. Now that Trump put the tariffs on, they know this campaign has failed.”
Graham Allison, former dean of Harvard Kennedy School who recently met with Xi and other Chinese officials, elaborated.
“They’ve studied Trump carefully and have a pretty realistic view of the situation,” Allison said. “Xi has been vocal about his effort to conceptualize the relationship as one where the U.S. and China are both rivals and partners simultaneously.”
With Trump, however, that will prove challenging.
In fact, one senior Trump administration official characterized the president’s early actions on the world stage — his quest to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, his desire to bring peace to the Middle East, and his aggressive approach to Greenland and the Panama Canal, for instance — as calculated to shape future relations with China.
“All the stuff he’s doing is so that we can put more resources” toward countering China, the official said.
Xi, therefore, has examined both Trump and the Cold War in great detail. He has done this because he does not want his country to experience the kind of isolation that the Soviet Union experienced during the Cold War, and he knows that could happen if Trump forges a closer relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump, of course, commands that kind of respect from Xi and other world leaders.
The real significance of this story, however, runs far deeper than the usual “Do Not Mess with Trump” narrative.
In short, the president has decided to treat Xi’s government the way a wise student of China’s ancient past would.
China has a lengthy history of assimilating invaders, from Genghis Khan’s Mongol incursion to the present day. And if you view the past in terms of millennia — as the Chinese, given their existence as an ancient and continuous civilization, most certainly do — then you understand that they cannot possibly have the same perspective on international affairs that Americans do. The Chinese, in light of their experiences in the 19th and 20th centuries, have reasons to view Westerners as invaders.
At the same time, the Chinese have generally avoided direct conflicts with Westerners. They prefer patience, subtlety, and even infiltration.
During the Korean War, in fact, one of the few times that U.S. and Chinese troops have clashed, the Chinese launched a counteroffensive that drove the American Eighth Army from the Yalu River, the border between China and the Korean Peninsula, and the Chinese did this only after sneaking in behind the American position undetected. The longest retreat in American military history followed.
In recent decades, the Chinese have carried out the economic equivalent of the 1950 Yalu River crossing. They have chosen patience, subtlety, and even infiltration to gain the upper hand. And they have relied on stupid or compromised American politicians to perpetuate a systematic trade imbalance at American citizens’ expense.
In short, Xi has panicked because he knows that Trump, whether from close study or sound instinct, recognizes as much.
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