China’s View of America Has Changed From Alarm to a Shrug

There is no shortage of Western commentary on US President Donald Trump’s second term. What’s missing is an honest account of how 1.4 billion of us in China see it – or at least how China’s officials and scholars do, since that’s who I can speak for here. I’ve spent a decade watching that view change, from real alarm in 2017 to something closer to a shrug today.
Four things now count as consensus among Chinese scholars. One, Trump is undermining America’s alliance system. His first term rattled Washington’s furniture. His second is dismantling the house. He has purged the civil service, stretched executive power, taxed friend and foe alike, and gutted America’s contribution to global public goods.

He appears to be governing for the next election, not the next generation – and this is speeding up the arrival of a multipolar world.

Two, hostility to China is bipartisan in Washington, but Trump’s version comes with a price tag, which we find oddly reassuring. When tariffs on Chinese goods hit 145 per cent last year, American retailers, farmers and manufacturers howled, inflation bit and the White House backed into a truce. The lesson we draw: his toughness is a negotiating tactic, not a crusade. That leaves room to manage the relationship.

Three, pressure has been a poor substitute for actual containment. The 2018 trade war spooked Chinese firms. By 2026, the mood has flipped. Turns out sanctions are quite good at building the thing they’re meant to prevent.

Chinese chipmakers have scaled up mature 28-nanometre production. Home-grown chip-design software now holds a quarter of the domestic market. Solar panels and electric vehicles have found new buyers across Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. America’s share of China’s trade shrank.

Four, the real contest is in governance, and time is on China’s side. American policy lurches with every election. China’s five-year plans, for better or worse, tend to survive them. America still leads in technology and firepower, but we’re betting that policy continuity and industrial scale will keep narrowing the gap.

Add those four up and what you get is less an argument than a mood – of relaxed, quiet confidence.

Eight years ago, China absorbed Trump’s tariffs and improvised. Now it hits back with tools – export controls on rare earths, a blacklist of “unreliable” foreign firms, tariffs of our own on energy – while building alternatives to Washington-led institutions through Brics, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and Belt and Road Initiative. It has gone from rule-taker to rule-shaper.

China is not trying to beat the United States. It is trying to improve the lives of its people, hit what we call “common prosperity” and complete national rejuvenation, by which we mean restoring China to what we see as its rightful place in the world.

That is both the official and our genuine position. Winning was never the goal. But if you improve your country enough, for long enough, overtaking the country that used to be ahead is simply what ends up happening.

In wind, solar, batteries and electric vehicles, Chinese firms now account for more than half of global capacity, output and exports. The country has built the world’s largest ultra-high-voltage grid and energy storage system, which is how it moves power from where the sun and wind are to where the people are. A state-run satellite network monitors carbon emissions, giving global, high-precision coverage. China has become the country that sets the standard for what a green transition looks like.

In AI, America still leads on chips and the underlying algorithms, but China claims the lead on deployment: government services, smart manufacturing and smart cities. In space, the comparison we Chinese scholars like to draw is with Starlink – commercial, narrow, built for coverage – against China’s broader, state-run programme: crewed missions, lunar exploration, the BeiDou satellite network and the Tiangong space station. [...]

There are caveats. America still has the deepest capital markets, the best universities, and decades of accumulated research. China still lags in precision manufacturing and some industrial software; external pressure is squeezing its exports in the short term; and the wider geopolitical picture remains genuinely unstable. I’ll admit these caveats read a little like the fine print below an advert for something you didn’t need.

Ten years ago, many of us held an admiring, almost idealised view of America. That’s gone.

We credit America’s historical contribution to the modern world. We also see, clearly now, 20 years of financial excess, winner-takes-all politics and social fracture. The Trump years have been a blessing in disguise: the pressure stings now, but it is forcing China to fix its weaknesses faster. We don’t reject competing with America. We’d rather China compete without conflict, and coexist.

by Wang Wen, South China Morning Post |  Read more: 

Image: uncredited

[ed. A rational, coordinated national policy in action. Unfortunately, it's not us.]