The fundamentals of the U.S.–China conflict point to more confrontation.
WASHINGTON—President-elect Donald Trump is set to escalate deterrence against communist China’s aggression during his second term.
The first Trump administration steered U.S.–China relations away from partners to strategic competitors. It began restricting China’s access to U.S. semiconductor technology and capital and identified the Indo–Pacific region as the priority theater for the United States, a trajectory that the Biden administration continued.
By the end of his first term, Trump experienced first-hand the result of placing trust in the communist regime. The United States was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, borne from an outbreak in China that was covered up by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The January 2020 phase one trade deal with China to rebalance the trade deficit went largely unfulfilled.
On Nov. 16, at his last official meeting with President Joe Biden, CCP leader Xi Jinping said he was ready to work with the incoming Trump administration. “China’s goal of a stable, healthy, and sustainable China–U.S. relationship remains unchanged,” Xi said.
When congratulating Trump on his reelection recently, CCP leader Xi Jinping said that the two countries will stand to “gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation.”
Experts say to expect confrontation.
Australia-based former Peking University law professor Yuan Hongbing used to be Xi’s drinking buddy during the 1980s when Xi was the deputy mayor of Xiamen in the coastal Fujian Province. Yuan told The Epoch Times that Xi and Trump’s “conflict of fate” is “inevitable.”
Yuan said Xi is determined to revive the international communist movement and dominate the future of mankind in the name of communism—what Xi calls the “community of common destiny,” which is strategically in conflict with Trump’s ideal of “making America great again.”
While Xi has long advocated that the United States and China could “coexist peacefully,” Yuan said these remarks reflect the CCP’s nature—saying nice things in public while doing harm in practice.
David Arase, a professor of international politics at the Johns Hopkins University’s Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies in China’s Nanjing city, likened Xi’s statement to a Chinese expression about two tigers: one in charge of the east mountain and the other presiding over the west mountain.
By Terri Wu
