‘Trump got China wrong’: 2 US-China experts on Washington’s missteps

Welcome to Open Dialogue, a new series from the Post where we bring together leading voices to discuss the stories and subjects occupying international headlines.

In this edition, two leading China watchers discuss the consequential relationship between the world’s two largest economies and how ties might develop under the second Donald Trump administration amid growing trade frictions.

Professor Li Cheng, a leading political scientist who has studied China for decades, is the founding director of the University of Hong Kong’s Centre on Contemporary China and the World. He previously spent 17 years at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, which included heading up the think tank’s John L. Thornton China Centre.

Andrew Browne is an award-winning journalist who has covered China for The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters and the South China Morning Post. More recently, he was a partner at advisory firm The Brunswick Group, where he advised some of the world’s largest companies on geopolitical strategy from his New York base.

The past few months have been a roller-coaster ride for US-China relations, beginning with President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, followed by the tit-for-tat trade war and then trade negotiations.

What are your assessments of the health of bilateral ties and how do you see things unfolding?

Li: China certainly feels that the pressure is not just on China. Of course, China is a major trading partner of the US, but the US is not China’s No 1 or No 2 trading partner and trade with the US is only 16 per cent of China’s entire foreign trade – we should put that into perspective.