Jessica Chen Weiss is the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies and the inaugural director of the new Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington and a non-resident senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Centre for China Analysis. She was a senior adviser to the policy planning staff at the US Department of State from August 2021 to July 2022. She was previously a professor at Cornell University and an assistant professor at Yale University and is a prolific author on China-US relations.
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She was previously a professor at Cornell University and an assistant professor at Yale University and is a prolific author on China-US relations. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.
What will China-US relations look like under the Trump administration, especially now there are so many hawks in his cabinet?
I think it’s very hard to know that. Alongside his appointments we still have, of course, Trump himself, his own remarks. Things that he has said recently have been a little bit unprecedented, including reportedly inviting Xi Jinping to attend the inauguration. [Xi did not attend.]
And in his nomination of the new ambassador to China [David Perdue], Trump talked about having a “productive working relationship with China’s leaders”. So I think we’ll have to see where he truly is going to go with it.
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So there are contradictory signs, right? Because he said he had a conversation with President Xi some time ago, and that they were good friends, but on the other hand, he appointed many hardliners to key positions.
Yes, and in some sense, we saw some of that dynamic in the first term as well. And so I think we don’t yet know whether or not Trump 2.0 will look more like the first portion of the Trump administration, or more like toward the end, in the latter months of 2020, when many of these more hawkish appointees went in rapid succession through a series of policy changes that were quite tough on China.