Donald Trump’s election as America’s forty-fifth President, has met with little tangible comment from China’s leaders. Well, little substantive comment, anyways, despite the bombastic New York developer's constant signals pre and post-election that his administration will pursue policies which might prove to be problematic for Beijing’s rulers.
Some think that, true to cautious form as players of the long game, Chinese leaders are merely lying in wait for opportunities to put the US in its place and assert their country’s power. This school of thought holds that Beijing is merely giving Trump enough rope for to hang himself with, after which they can opine endlessly about American decay and incompetence. Policy missteps, knee-jerk decisions, a chronic lack of vision, scandals and perhaps even impeachment could result if they sit back and just let Trump be Trump. After all, his presidential campaign was an organizational shambles, without direction, coherent message or organizational structure. This model could never be replicated in governance and would very soon collapse of its own inherent contradictions.
Unfortunately for this theory, Trump won. And while he still shows little evidence of vision or personal self-restraint, his cabinet picks are experienced, tough and disciplined, especially under the practiced political tutelage of Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Furthermore, Trump is very likely to be a more distant, CEO-styled commander-in-chief than his policy wonkish predecessor, leaving minutiae and details to his team. If his hands-off attitude leads to effective cabinet government, then the impact of his freewheeling will be lessened.
In fact, there are clear signs that the Chinese Communist Party leadership, like the Republican Party establishment and Hillary Clinton before them, have themselves been wrong-footed and do not know how to react to as unconventional a leader as Trump. No one -- certainly the head of state of a major power, notwithstanding THE major power (whatever the Middle Kingdom’s aspirations, she is not yet in a position to challenge the United States for global hegemony) -- in post-cold war memory has taken such an initially aggressive posture with, nor ever used such blunt-forced, undiplomatic or non-deferential terms when confronting China.
China’s leaders, as numerous domestic commentators (or thinly-veiled state-sponsored mouthpieces) have pointed out, are unhappy about the unprecedented barrage of invective Trump directed and continues to direct at them, so why exercise such discretion in responding? For one thing, the leadership must be trying to determine if this is just Trump’s unorthodox style in diplomacy, or whether or not he is really shooting from the hip. For example, does Trump think he is just making casual comments, but Beijing takes it very seriously, since they are, in their view, engaged in a life-and-death struggle for world domination.
Not so long ago, Chinese leaders employed an extremely effectively strategy in proactively seizing the diplomatic advantage by utilizing audacious gambits designed to force incoming US administrations "off their game." They let American presidential candidates rail against an amorphous “China” and then challenge them early in their first months in office, throwing them off balance with calculated, provocative actions designed to put US chief executives on the defensive for the rest of their terms.
George W. Bush, for instance, faced a crisis on April 1st of his first year in the White House when a Chinese jet (intentionally or not) clipped the wing of a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane within international airspace over the South China Sea. Beijing then imprisoned the downed plane’s 24 aviators for 11 days, successfully exacted what amounted to a public apology and a ransom, and completed the humiliation by stripping the Navy plane of its sensitive electronic gear and requiring it to be chopped into pieces for scrap.
Beijing tested his successor by harassing two unarmed Navy reconnaissance vessels, the ‘Impeccable’ and the ‘Victorious,’ in the South China and Yellow Seas in a series of incidents beginning March 2009. One of those occurrences was so serious -- the attempted severing of the 'Impeccable's' towed sonar array -- that by the US Navy’s operational rules of engagement, it essentially constituted an attack on a American vessel, in other words, deserving of a retaliatory response.
Bush and Obama, pursuing misguided approaches, attempted to minimize the impact of China’s boundary-testing conduct. Both presidents took pains to avoid further confrontations with Beijing and throughout their terms looked and acted as if intimidated, if not cowed. Throughout these administrations, Beijing continually tested the limits of what they could get away with -- testing the limits of Hong Kong's Basic Law by kidnapping errant book publishers, enlarging tiny dots of sand into man-made islands weaponized with fighter aircraft bristling with surface-to-air missile batteries, all of which introduced an element of instability in the region – and did so largely without America imposing costs for such behavior.
Enter a new type of leader, Donald J. Trump. The willful president-elect did not wait for China to challenge him. On December 2, he preemptively seized the initiative by taking what is now known as “The Call” from Taiwan's President Tsai ing-Wen.
By so doing Trump turned the tables on Beijing, even before his swearing-in ceremony. His conversation with Taiwan’s president was not some happenstance event, as he later tried to somewhat disingenuously characterize it, but the result of weeks of behind-the-scenes staff work on both sides.
As both critics and admirers noted, the call undermined more than four decades of tacit policy, and Trump made it clear he knew exactly what he was doing -- or at least said he did. “I fully understand the One-China policy,” he told an interviewer after the ten-minute conversation, “but I don’t know why we have to be bound by a One-China policy.” In action and in fact he was essentially equating China’s claim that Taiwan was a Chinese province with their assertion of the infamous “nine-dash line’s” historical validity. (As an aside, the mainland Chinese government annexed Taiwan in 1887 and ruled it until 1895, when the Japanese took over; China ruled Taiwan briefly from 1945 to 1949 -- the years between the end of the second Sino-Japanese War and the Communist defeat of the Nationalists. Though most Westerners see Taiwan as a long-standing part of China, it has been fully ruled by the mainland for only roughly a dozen years).
The most remarkable aspect of this extraordinary series of events is China’s reaction or, more precisely, its TWO apparently uncoordinated reactions. First, the Chinese air force on December 10 flew planes completely around Taiwan. That was the second time in two weeks China’s aircraft had done so, the first time an apparent (and unheeded) warning to Tsai to not make the call to Trump. Then last month the ‘Liaoning,’ China’s only aircraft carrier, with five escorts took a wide detour on the passage from Qingdao to Hainan to brush by the east coast of Taiwan, an action recently repeated. Trump is often accused of employing a ham-fisted lack of subtlety in his tactics, and while China’s actions are undoubtedly intimidating they have been carried out with such heavy-handedness that it has served to both raise the visibility of the cross-strait issue and risks allowing the Taipei government licence to portray itself as a heroic David standing up against a thuggish Goliath.
Moreover, many observers interpret China’s seizure of a U.S. Navy drone last month in international waters in the South China Sea as another response to the Tsai call. Trump tweeted about the incident as well, suggesting the Chinese could actually keep the errant machine, especially given the open statements by both the American military and scientists that the drone’s equipment is unclassified and that it was being used in seismic studies. Trump’s rapid and startling suggestion came with such alacrity that it suggests he (and his advisors) were almost waiting for an act such as this, and his reaction was almost certainly an attempt to divest the Chinese of leverage acquired by grabbing the underwater craft. Indeed, it seemed quite a climb-down when the Chinese belatedly returned the machine days later, claiming that the incident was essentially no big deal. Lost in the furor was the Obama regime's sputtering non-response which allowed Trump to claim he'd compelled Beijing to back off.
For another reason which might explain the current state hydra-headed approach to the incoming US administration is whether or not Beijing is truly speaking with one voice. A perennial question regarding China has been that of the true balance of power between the civilian and military factions which uneasily share power in their curiously opaque governmental system. Deng Xiaoping discovered in 1989 that the armed forces needed to be treated with some caution as military units initially refused to fire on the students at Tianamen Square; years later rumours abounded that former Chonqing party bigwig Bo Xilai had conspired with various generals and Politburo members to move against Xi prior to the former being arrested for corruption and complicity in an act of homicide against a British national. President Xi Jinping has accumulated power and influence unseen since Deng's days, concentrating on a massive war on corruption campaign that has consumed many of his opponents along the way, including high-ranking military officers who were allies of previous presidents Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin. It might well be that restless generals may be asserting their own privileges by taking certain actions of their own to divert attention from themselves before Xi's inquistiors draw too close.
In any case the recent aggressive actions of the Chinese military, which has seemingly been implementing its own foreign policy in recent years, is in stark contrast to, the curiously restrained response from China’s civilian leaders. Trump has repeatedly slammed them in subsequent tweets, but Beijing has refrained from directly criticizing him as an individual, choosing vague pronouncements instead. Provocation on one hand, restraint on another. Where the collective leadership’s prior actions could be seen in coordination -- perpetrating a military-based incident of some sort, followed by diplomatic chastisement of the Americans for being provocative, overreaching, arrogant or childish, just a military act followed by…the sounds of tumbleweed rustling about on an empty street.
Whether one belongs to China's military or political inpower, Trump’s effective use of Twitter must be utterly confounding. After all, China’s uber- scripted leaders are picked by their fellow Communist Party cadres, all of them stay in power by coercion rather than persuasion, and everyone speaks, or writes in extremely circumscribed language that can be elliptical at best, confoundingly vague at worst.
Trump is not acting like any of his predecessors, and while that is often held to be a criticism, it has had one important beneficial effect: unnerving overly confident Chinese officials who have become too accustomed to dealing with American presidents behind closed doors, not in the white-hot lights of the public eye.
Take Trump’s soon-to-be counterpart, the aforementioned Xi Jinping. Xi has only one social media posting to his credit in his entire career, and that was posted to the account of a Party media outlet, the authoritative PLA Daily. Tellingly, Xi has no account of his own on 'Weibo,' China’s Twitter-like service. China’s supremo, apart from on-high pronouncements, does not seem big on direct communication either.
Even though Trump cannot stop communicating his intentions, Xi & Co. give every signal of being unprepared for him. For instance, Beijing, as the Financial Times reported, was “shocked” by the appointment of the Sino-skeptic Peter Navarro as head the newly formed National Trade Council even while the American press openly bandied his name about.
Chinese leaders had hoped, and almost certainly expected, Trump would follow his predecessors and “tone down his anti-Beijing rhetoric after assuming office.” With Navarro, Commerce Secretary pick Wilbur Ross, and U.S. Trade Representative-designate Robert Lighthizer -- trade hawks all --Trump has put Beijing on notice that he is unafraid of taking them on. Chinese leaders should have seen this coming.
They should also have anticipated his own brand of highly personalised "cowboy" diplomacy. Deeply distrustful of state bureaucracy (as befitting a capitalist entrepeneur), inexperienced at government (without any real desire to know how institutional “power” or "red tape" works), Trump prefers to deal with those he considers as his own peers, whether at home or abroad. His entire cabinet is composed of self-made individuals, who rose through achievement or merit, without metaphorical "silver spoons" in their mouth. Rather than engage governments directly he reaches out to fellow billionaires like Jack Ma of Alibaba and Masayoshi Son of Softbank to see how corporations can solve thorny issues such as globalization inequities and foreign investment. His may indeed be a transactional presidency, not a visionary one, but the nature of those transactions will be highly personal.
And this highlights an opportunity area for the Chinese to rectify. Much of their foreign policy derives from the input of think-tanks, non-governmental bodies constituted around academics and analysts with limited knowledge of American history, politics and governance. They simply lack the kind of institutional knowledge to truly understand a robber-baron, media showman's approach to leadership. Nor could they ever truly embarrass a man for whom any kind of publicity (or notoriety) is better than NO publicity.
There is one other explanation for Beijing lying so low. At the moment, Chinese technocrats are engaged in an all-out war against speculators shorting the renminbi, the Chinese currency.
The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, looks like it has been spending tens of billions of dollars in the past several days supporting the “redback,” which fell 6.95% last year against the dollar in the onshore market. Perhaps Beijing is letting Trump alone because they do not want him tweeting about their desperate effort to stabilize the situation. He has, as just about everyone knows, complained about their rigging of the Chinese currency.
China is now rigging its currency upwards, not down as Trump has alleged, but in Beijing they undoubtedly do not want to take a chance and get involved in a Twitter war with him over any subject, a conflict they know they cannot possibly win.
For the moment, it seems, China's leaders have just met someone impossible for them to intimidate or shame.
Whether this proves to be a net positive for the world and the region remains to be seen.And it's not even inauguration day yet.