Paywall, but some highlights.
“Beijing Braces for a Rematch of Trump vs. China”
“Last year, as Mike Pompeo’s memoir, “Never Give an Inch,” made the rounds among China’s leaders, one passage in particular enraged Xi Jinping. The secretary of state under former President Donald Trump wrote that the U.S. should “grant full diplomatic recognition” to Taiwan.
Xi’s anger at the remark foreshadowed a broader worry coursing through Beijing: What awaits China should Trump and his inner circle regain power?
Trump’s four years in the White House had brought turmoil to the relationship. When he left in 2020, Beijing breathed a sigh of relief. “Good riddance, Donald Trump!” the official Xinhua News Agency said in an unusually expressive tweet.
Now Chinese officials are quietly preparing for the prospect of Trump’s return to the White House—and bracing for drama in its U.S. relations to amp up again, according to people close to the Chinese leadership’s thinking.”
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“Trump and his trade-war lieutenant, Robert Lighthizer, have openly advocated all but cutting off China’s access to America’s markets, technology and capital.”
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“Trump’s surprise 2016 victory upended the U.S.’s longstanding strategy of deepening economic ties with China.
Xi and his underlings initially believed Trump’s tough talk masked a fear of China’s economic strength. When Trump started setting tariffs on China in early 2018 to force Beijing to change its state-led economic practices, Beijing hit back in kind each time, figuring the businessman-turned-president would eventually back down.
Tit-for-tat escalation followed. The American levies on imports of Chinese goods ended up quadrupling from 3% to 12% on average during Trump’s first term.
Long used to being the more histrionic party in the relationship, China’s Communist rulers found themselves having to deal with an erratic dealmaker using extreme pressure to extract concessions from Beijing.
“Under Trump, we had a bad experience,” Liu Jianchao, a senior party diplomat seen as China’s likely next foreign minister, said at a closed-door session with American think tanks earlier this year, according to people who attended the meeting.
The economic cost to Beijing of Trump’s tariffs, retained by Biden, is real. Chinese companies slapped with tariffs exported less to the U.S., reduced hiring, spent less on research and development and were less likely to start new ventures, according to research from economists at Peking University, Fudan University and other leading Chinese universities. Overall, the damage to China’s gross domestic product from the trade war was three times as high as the hit to the U.S., according to some Chinese economists.”
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“A spokeswoman for the Trump team referred to his past remarks indicating he would take an aggressive stance if he gets back in power. “My agenda will tax China to build up America,” Trump said early last year. “As a matter of both economic and national security, I will implement a bold series of reforms to completely eliminate dependence on China in all critical areas.”
If Trump gets re-elected, said Matt Turpin, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution who served on Trump’s National Security Council, “on day one, he would ask how China lived up to the Phase One trade agreement. Then he would instruct Lighthizer to pick up where we left off.”
In his book, published last year, Lighthizer describes China as “the greatest threat that the American nation and its system of Western liberal democratic government has faced since the American revolution.””
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/trump-china-rematch-beijing-0b0a9c6e?mod=hp_lead_pos10
"The era of basing our production in China, of delegating our defense to the U.S., and of getting our energy from Russia is over. The rules of the game have changed," he said. The French president accused both the U.S. and China of failing to respect global trade rules in massively subsidizing their economies.
“However strong our alliance with America is, we are not a priority for them” he said. “They have two priorities: themselves — fair enough — and China.”
Europe declined to join the USA in our "trade war" with China. Now they too see the folly in exporting their manufacturing and money to China, who steals the intellectual property and builds their industrial base to replace western industry. Europe still has a huge industrial base, but it is dying, and serious action is required to save it.