In its rivalry with the US, China has racked up a series of wins in recent weeks.
The Trump administration has softened its criticism of China’s Communist Party in a strategy document. It has reopened a channel for high-end chip sales that Washington once treated as untouchable. And President Donald Trump has held his tongue as a key US ally in Asia faces Chinese intimidation for backing Taiwan.
For Beijing, the shifts in Washington’s approach suggest that Trump has less of an appetite for confronting China over ideology, technology and diplomacy. Some commentators in China have hailed these developments as irrefutable signs of American decline and Chinese ascendancy.
Trump’s decision on Monday to allow some advanced chips to be sold to China, the prominent Chinese technology executive Zhou Hongyi said on social media, showed how China’s unstoppable technological rise had “pushed the United States against a wall”.
The Global Times, a Communist Party newspaper, pointed to the White House’s new national security strategy, which focuses more on the Western Hemisphere than China, as “evidence of the US acknowledging its relative decline in power”. Washington has realised “it cannot afford the costs of prolonged confrontation” with China, the nationalist blog Jiuwanli similarly concluded.
And Trump has remained publicly silent as China has mounted a pressure campaign against Japan, a US ally, over that country’s support for Taiwan. Beijing has summoned Japanese diplomats, cancelled flights, curbed tourism and stepped up military flights near Japanese airspace, including with Russia, to highlight its displeasure.
This is Trump’s more transactional diplomacy in action, according to Chinese analysts. In this less hawkish, more pragmatic approach, China is seen not as a threat to US supremacy that must be contained, but as a major nation to be negotiated with.
That shift was laid out plainly in Trump’s national security strategy, released last week. It recast the US-China rivalry as chiefly an economic contest and not a struggle over security or political systems. The strategy’s stated priority: establishing a “mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing”.
And unlike previous Presidents, Trump showed no interest in the longstanding American project of promoting democracy in China. For the first time in more than 30 years, the national security strategy did not criticise China’s authoritarian rule or press Beijing to uphold human rights — sentiments echoed by Presidents from George H.W. Bush to Joseph R. Biden Jr and even to Trump himself in 2017, during his first term.
The strategy showed that “China’s push to make the international system friendlier to autocracy is no longer on our list of priorities”, said Caroline Costello, assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, who analysed previous national security strategies released since 1986, when Congress began requiring US Presidents to submit their foreign policy visions.
Xin Qiang, a US-China expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, said that the strategy showed that the Trump administration had finally realised that “trying to change China by playing the ideological card is neither possible nor feasible”.
“At least since Trump took office in his second term, he hasn’t shown a strong ideological drive in his China policy. It’s what we call ‘profit-driven’,” he said, adding that this was good for China.
Trump’s transactional bent may help explain why his administration reversed export controls on critical artificial intelligence technology that can help China economically and militarily. It granted Nvidia, the American chip maker, permission to begin selling its second-most-powerful semiconductor to China. The US government would receive 25 per cent of all the revenues from the sales, Trump said in a social media post, a trade that critics said prioritises short-term economic gain over long-term American security interests.
New York Times News Service
