It is the question no Chinese official dare ask: has Xi Jinping, the chairman of everything, monumentally mishandled Donald Trump?
Every day brings fresh attacks on the US President – many of them well deserved. Even previously loud Trump supporters, such as billionaires Bill Ackman and Elon Musk, have all in recent days made it clear that they are not on board with his tariff fundamentalism.
No one in a similar position in China would dare say anything remotely critical in public about their country’s leader. Quite the opposite.
Right now, a moronic inferno is spreading across the Chinese internet, celebrating Beijing’s sharp response to Trump’s tariff hit. “This is exactly the opportunity for counter-attack that China has been waiting for, and the time has come,” one nationalist commentator enthused.
You would have to have drunk a lot of the dear leader’s Kool-Aid, or rather Moutai, to think this is a moment China should be celebrating.
Trade ties between the Chinese economy and the US are on the brink. This is a disaster years in the making.
Beijing refused to deal with Washington’s longstanding grievances with China’s state-led economy in Trump’s first term. China’s strategy then was to outlast Trump rather than address the substance of any of his team’s complaints.
That approach has hit a fairly substantial hurdle: Trump is back and those grievances have only grown.
Determined to look tough, Xi last Friday made the brazen decision to counter Trump’s new 34 per cent tariff hike on China with a 34 per cent hit on American goods to start later this week. That headline-making decision catapulted China from one among a crowded field of trade partners Trump was grumbling about to being, once again, his chief antagonist.
Trump responded with a threatened further 50 tariff on Chinese goods unless Xi steps down – something that looks to be temperamentally impossible for China’s leader.
Instead, Beijing threatened further retaliation and vowed to “fight till the end”. It sounds as wise a strategy as trying to sober up after a Chinese banquet by rehydrating on baijiu.
All the while, Beijing says it is still open to negotiation – but now those talks, should they ever take place, will begin with China trying to get America to lower tariffs on Chinese goods from over 115 per cent, assuming they don’t rise even further in the coming days and weeks.
The speed with which Trump and Xi’s relationship has soured since the President returned to the White House is staggering.
Less than a month ago, a Beijing-based Chinese government adviser was telling me that Trump had been surprisingly gentle in his first few months back. Yes, my interlocutor told me, things would likely get tougher in the years ahead – but there was no sense that the floor in the two countries’ economic relationship was to fall away in three weeks’ time.
Beijing, of course, didn’t know exactly what was coming on “Liberation Day”. However, no one in China’s top-heavy, Leninist-political system forced Xi’s response. As we would say of a howler made by an Australian leader, this was a captain’s call.
Xi and his advisers think the inflationary shock Trump’s tariffs will put on American consumers is their magic weapon. Time will tell if they are wise or foolish.
The leadership cults around both Xi and Trump make it likely things will only get worse from here.
Both Xi and Trump have obscenely proportioned egos. Both surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear. Both lead countries that define the other as their greatest strategic rival.
It would require heroic leadership for these two to build trust with each other and calm their increasingly hostile relationship. Since Trump was inaugurated in January, they haven’t managed to even pick up the phone and have a conversation.
For now, whatever their domestic fan bases might say to the contrary, their dysfunctional relationship is making the world a poorer and more dangerous place by the day.
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