Donald Trump turns up pressure on China on several fronts

US rhetoric escalates and officials weigh new restrictions with ties between the world’s two largest economies already fraying.

William Barr warns American businesses they are at risk of collaborating with a Chinese government that ultimately seeks to supplant them. Picture: AFP

The Trump administration is ­intensifying pressure on China, piling on visa bans, sanctions and other restrictions that are battering already unsettled ties between the world’s two largest economies.

US Attorney-General William Barr, in a speech on Thursday (Friday AEST), warned American businesses that they were at risk of collaborating with a Chinese government that ultimately sought to supplant them in its ­expanding state-run economy.

Administration officials are also discussing banning travel by Chinese Communist Party members and their families to the US, people familiar with the matter said. Discussions are in early ­stages, with no timeline for being put into effect, the people said. If put into policy, advisers and policy analysts said the ban would strike at the legitimacy of the ­increasingly powerful party.

The administration has amped up a broader confrontation with Beijing in recent weeks by imposing sanctions on a member of the CCP leadership, signing legislation that targets other Chinese officials and holding full-scale military exercises in the South China Sea.

All this has come after President Donald Trump for months has blamed China for covering up the initial coronavirus outbreak that his administration has struggled to contain in the US.

Hawkish policies from both governments over trade, technology and global influence have pitched relations downward for the past two years. The US is largely steering the latest downturn, seeing gains in pressuring on Beijing, according to current and former officials and analysts.

Mr Trump’s political advisers said that displaying toughness on China resonates with voters ahead of the November election and that portraying his presumptive Democrat rival, Joe Biden, as weak on China is a potent campaign pitch.

“No administration has been tougher on China than this ­administration,” Mr Trump said during remarks in the White House’s Rose Garden on Tuesday. In his long, wide-ranging comments, he mentioned Mr Biden more than 25 times while repeatedly returning to China and his administration’s efforts to thwart it.

Mr Biden also has toughened his approach to China and said his decades of dealing with Beijing make him better suited than Mr Trump to navigate the current turbulence.

China has added to the recent run-up in tensions. It imposed a harsh national security law on Hong Kong, the Chinese territory that is a global financial centre. Chinese diplomats have also gone on a rhetorical offensive, casting the US as bullying and out of control, and suggesting America is to blame for the coronavirus.

Even so, Beijing has become concerned about the deteriorating ties with its major trading partner, especially at a time when the Chinese economy — while showing signs of recovering from the slowdown induced by the coronavirus — isn’t back to full strength.

In a speech last week, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that the US-China relationship faces its “most severe challenge since the establishment of diplomatic ties”. He said China had no intention of having a full-scale confrontation with the US and urged Washington to resume contacts and restore stability to ties. “Only communication can dispel falsehoods. Only dialogue can prevent miscalculation,” Mr Wang said. “Slandering others does not clear one’s own name, and finger-pointing cannot ­resolve any problems.”

Some Trump administration officials says the President is more cautious than he lets on and that he’s trying to balance applying pressure on Beijing to further US interests without blowing up the relationship.

China hawks in the administration are urging him to take more drastic steps, including sanctions on a larger number of Chinese officials. Mr Trump has so far resisted those calls, one of the officials said. One reason is that some in the administration don’t want to undermine a trade deal reached in January that ­requires China to ramp up purchases of American farm products and other goods this year.

The points of contention with China have become so numerous that some business executives and policy analysts say that the global economic order is fracturing and that a mutual suspicion reminiscent of the Cold War is ­exacerbating the disagreements.

“We’re kind of in a downward spiral where we’ve cut off things from China, they’ve cut off things from us,” said Robert Zoellick, former World Bank president and deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush and now a senior counsellor at the Brunswick Group, a consulting firm.

“The degree of hostility is ­spiralling out of control,” Mr Zoellick said on Thursday at the Aspen Security Forum.

“We kind of have to steady ourselves.”

The Wall Street Journal