Trump’s First-Term China Strategy: Tariffs, Sanctions, and Strategic Confrontation

The US President Donald Trump met Xi Jinping in May of this year. The trip has been remarkably chummy. Trump has spent most of it gushing about how beautiful China is and complimenting his host. And he was apparently unable to extract any meaningful concessions, apart from apparently a commitment from Xi that China wouldn’t supply weapons to Iran, something that Trump already claimed Xi agreed to in the last meeting. This is probably a good thing from the perspective of anyone who wants to avoid a superpower complex, but it’s a pretty remarkable turnaround from Trump, who used to be incredibly hawkish towards China. So, to appreciate just how dramatic this reversal has been, it’s worth remembering quite how hawkish Trump used to be on the so-called China issue. When he first came on the political scene in 2015, one of Trump’s big talking points was China.

To the extent that the 2016 election was sometimes framed as a choice between the confront-China candidate in Trump versus a confront-Russia candidate in Clinton. Trump’s main bugbear was the fact that the US ran and still runs a large bilateral trade deficit with China. This has been happening since the ’80s, but it really ballooned in the 2000s and was running at about $350 billion when Trump took office in 2016. To remedy this, in January 2016, Trump suggested a flat 45% tariff on all Chinese imports. Obviously, this didn’t actually end up happening, but the tariffs Trump did impose were nonetheless pretty severe, at least by modern standards. Trump began applying tariffs to an ever-expanding list of Chinese goods in July 2018. By the end of his presidency, Trump had imposed tariffs averaging about 20% on most Chinese imports. 

Throughout his term, Trump also imposed a number of sanctions on Chinese tech companies like Huawei and ZTE, and on companies suspected of doing business in Xinjiang. Trump also lashed out against Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea, wherein China claims roughly 90% of the region using something called the nine-dash line, after which a map published by a Chinese cartographer in 1936. In his tweet dated December 2016, Trump asked, “Did China ask us to build a massive complex........

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