With his storm of tariffs on Chinese goods, US President Donald Trump has torched ties with Beijing and likely wrecked any hope of meeting his counterpart Xi Jinping in the near term, analysts say.
Since taking office in January, Trump’s maelstrom of import duties against friend and foe alike has rattled diplomats and pushed global markets to the brink of financial meltdown.
A screeching halt on further levies for most countries has calmed nerves — for now at least — but there has been no reprieve for China, accused by the US leader of trying to “screw” Washington.
Adding to the tensions, talks between the two superpowers on international issues like climate change and opioid addiction seem to have stalled.
“Under Trump, China-US ties have sunk to the worst state of affairs short of a fairly large armed conflict,” Shi Yinhong, director of the Center for American Studies at Beijing’s Renmin University of China, said.
“Trump has unsheathed his dagger against China at a speed that exceeded many people’s imaginations,” he said.
After a flurry of tit-for-tat hikes, the United States now charges tariffs of 145 percent on many products imported from China, with cumulative duties on some goods reaching a staggering 245 percent.
A furious Beijing has set a retaliatory toll of 125 percent on goods entering from the United States, and dismissed further rises as pointless.
US-China relations are in “effectively a state of economic war”, Susan Thornton, who served as acting top US diplomat for East Asia during Trump’s first administration, told AFP.
“China views Trump’s stated intent to… erect a ‘tariff wall against China’ as illegal and an existential threat,” Thornton, now a senior fellow at Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center, said.
No backing down
Just a few weeks ago, multiple reports suggested Beijing and Washington were mulling a face-to-face meeting to coincide with the two leaders’ birthdays in June.
But recent events have effectively left those plans dead in the water.
Trump’s “rude and unreasonable” behaviour has made any talks in the first half of the year “very unlikely”, according to Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University.
Rosemary Foot, a professor and senior research fellow at Oxford University’s politics and international relations department, said Beijing “would want to ensure that there would be some policy deliverables and Xi would be treated with respect”.
Trump has approached the trade conflict with a typical mixture of flattery, denigration and bombast — slamming China’s “lack of respect” while hailing Xi as a “smart guy” and talking up a prospective trade deal.
Ali Wyne, a senior research and advocacy adviser focusing on US-China ties at the International Crisis Group think tank, said neither Trump nor Xi “will want to convey that he has yielded to the other”.
The “likeliest impetus” for talks, he said, would be a scenario where both could claim victory — Trump by his willingness to keep ratcheting up economic pressure, and Xi by showing China’s resilience.
Rana Mitter, a professor of US-Asia relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, said a Trump-Xi summit was “still quite possible”, citing the mercurial US leader’s dizzying pivot from threatening war against North Korea in 2017 to meeting Kim Jong Un the following year.
“Beijing will not agree to meet if it looks as if they are conceding to the US, so behind-the-scenes diplomacy will likely be necessary,” Mitter said.
Back door shut
Other analysts said Trump’s fiery rhetoric and crippling tariffs had likely laid waste to backdoor talks.
Under his predecessor Joe Biden, Washington and Beijing maintained dialogue on the fentanyl crisis, climate change and other issues.
Those channels “are moribund now, as far as I can tell, and that makes it difficult to prepare the ground for such a summit”, Oxford’s Foot said.
Wu, of Fudan, said Trump’s out-of-hand dismissal of Chinese efforts to curb fentanyl precursor exports and his climate change denial meant the space for lower-track dialogue “has, in practice, already disappeared”.
In official pronouncements, China has mocked Trump’s tariffs as a “numbers game” and a “joke” with no economic benefits.
Beijing has also sought to cast itself as a defender of fair trade and stability in the face of unwarranted US “bullying”.
Experts said China may yet scent opportunity in the face of Trump’s economic carnage.
“Trump’s colossally ill-conceived mass alienation of other countries may mean more receptivity for China’s outreach,” said Yale’s Thornton — adding that Beijing was likely conducting “economic triage”.
