“Who is Trump?” asks a Chinese official close to the country’s military. “We don’t really know.”
China’s leaders are perplexed by the Republican candidate for president, and they look, depending on the moment, angered, fascinated, or terrified. Yet even though Donald Trump incessantly vilifies China, state media comments suggest the leadership in Beijing favors him over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
Why? In short, China’s leaders dislike Clinton intensely—it even looks personal—and apparently think they can buy or otherwise defang Trump.
There is almost nothing Chinese leaders like about the Democratic nominee. “Hillary is very fierce when it comes to China,” said the official with the military ties.
In contrast to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Donald John Trump must look like a godsend to Beijing. For one thing, the Chinese think he might give them nothing short of a once-in-a-century opportunity. The candidate who speaks of withdrawing from the World Trade Organization and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as well as breaking the North American Free Trade Agreement and decades-old bilateral alliances, can dismantle the global architecture put in place after the Second World War and isolate the United States for decades.
Therefore, the Chinese can see East Asia, free of Uncle Sam, as theirs to dominate. “The thought of a collapse of the U.S. alliances with Japan and South Korea and, in effect, the withdrawal of the United States from Asia is Xi Jinping’s dream come true,” William Stanton, the director of the Center for Asia Policy of Taiwan’s National Tsinghua University, told The Cipher Brief.
And Stanton, also Washington’s representative in Taiwan from 2009 to 2012, thinks Beijing anticipates icing on the cake: President Trump would stop hectoring Chinese leaders about human rights, criticism that bothers them to no end.
In the Republican candidate, therefore, Beijing believes it has someone it can work with. “Trump would be the world leader closest in personality to top Chinese Communist officials,” says Robert Blohm to The Cipher Brief. “They’ll probably grow to like each other.”
After all, there is an uncanny resemblance of Xi Jinping’s “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” As Blohm, just back from a decade serving as an economic policy advisor in Beijing, perceptively notes, the two share the politics of resentment.
The Chinese may not even be that concerned about The Donald’s bold promises to crack down on trade with their country. “Beijing sees Trump as nothing more than a businessman, and the Chinese are masterful business people, who have run circles around their American counterparts ever since Deng Xiaoping opened China,” notes Stanton.
Trump, however, might run some circles of his own. The Chinese have prospered, especially since their accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the end of 2001, because they were able to get the protections of the global trading body while for the most part avoiding costs for increasingly predatory trade behavior. Yet from the very start of his campaign, Trump has promised to stop China from taking advantage of the American worker. So Beijing’s gaming of trade rules looks set to end in a Trump administration, especially if he takes America out of the WTO.
Trump, more than Clinton, can disrupt the steady flow of Chinese-made goods into the American market. His proposed 45 percent tariff along with his other drastic measures can injure America, but they can take down weak economies in the process. Think of him as a modern-day Samson, disrupting the global economy and collapsing a fragile China.
And China is especially vulnerable at the moment. Its debt-laden economy is slowing fast, growing at perhaps a third of the reported 6.7 percent pace and heading for a contraction. The country’s trade, long the driver of growth, is faltering. Chinese exports for 2015 fell 2.8 percent. For the first six months of this year, they plummeted a stunning 7.7 percent.
But as bad as those numbers are, Trump can make them worse because China is dependent on the American market. Last year, China ran up a record merchandise trade surplus against the U.S. of $367.2 billion, and this year that surplus is growing at about the same pace as last, $131.3 billion through the first five months. He has made it clear that the U.S. will no longer tolerate these outsized trade deficits. Trump, whether he intends to or not, can push a trade-dependent China over the edge.
The real problem for Beijing, however, is neither Mr. Trump nor Secretary Clinton. As a matter of domestic political imperative, either of them as president will have to respond to Beijing in ways that will be fundamentally injurious to China’s interests. American public opinion now cannot be ignored, whether the issue at hand is economic, political, or geopolitical.
So the Chinese, in a sense, should spend less time thinking about which of the two candidates will be better for them and more about the pressures to which those candidates will have to respond.
Beijing has lost the American electorate, and that is what ultimately counts.
