China’s Best Friend? Donald Trump!

Back when they had policies, Republicans were concerned about China. Under the rule of its Communist Party, they said, China was an increasingly totalitarian power that could come to rival America’s global dominance. As was seldom the case when Republicans stated their positions, this time they were right. 

While China’s President Xi Jinping had not gone in for Stalin-style show trials, his persecution of China’s Uygur minority, his own chain of gulags, his personalization of power, his establishment of pervasive surveillance, his absolute intolerance of dissent (augmented by his paranoia), and his banishment (or worse) of anyone he suspected of insufficient loyalty to him at least smacked of Stalin, even if the death toll was not comparable. 

Behind Xi stood a nation that had become the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, due in no small part to Wall Street’s insistence that American manufacturers move their factories there, since Chinese workers came cheap. Like America in the mid-20th century, and Britain before that, China is now the workshop of the world. As well, it’s become a creator and deployer of advanced technology on a par with the United States—if not better. 

As China’s capacity has expanded, so has its reach. It has been enlarging and modernizing its armed forces, occupying (or creating) islands in the South China Sea; investing in and forming alliances with the nations of Africa, most of Asia, and the micro-countries of the Pacific Ocean, while endeavoring to build friendlier trade relations with Europe. It has supported totalitarian nations like North Korea and authoritarian nations like Russia. Most importantly, it has been the only nation whose rise in wealth, power, and influence challenges America’s status as the world’s hegemon, and that challenge is clearly rising.

So, Republicans’ concern about China—like the Democrats’ concern about China—was well founded. Problem is, no one has boosted China’s new standing as the world’s preferred hegemon as much as Donald Trump. During his first go-round as president, Trump’s behavioral preference for autocratic thugs made clear that he envied Xi, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un for their threat and, more, their use of state-directed violence to suppress and eliminate their critics and anyone who stood in their way. 

In his second term, Trump’s personal and impulsive hostility to other, insufficiently Trump-obeisant nations, including longtime allies and kindred democracies; his threats and employment of U.S. military force against nations and governments that didn’t threaten U.S. interests, absent any discernable strategic rationale; his loathing and degradation of non-white immigrants and the nations they came from (that is, the racism that guided both his domestic and foreign policy); and above all, the wayward, erratic personalism of his foreign policy, expressed through tariffs and force imposed practically at random, made clear to the world that the United States no longer had the predictability or merited the trust required of a hegemonic power.

While Xi’s dictatorial rule is immeasurably more repressive than anything Trump has (so far) implemented, China’s relations with other nations are guided by a discernable national strategy. Xi clings to his allies; he woos other governments with trade deals and investments. He seeks to subsume the nations on China’s periphery into a Greater China sphere of influence, which is the source of much anxiety in those nations, but this has been a Chinese policy, if not for time immemorial, then close to it—and a kind of robust Chinese equivalent to our newly revived Monroe Doctrine. 

Xi has stepped up these policies, and his threats to Taiwan seem more real than those of his predecessors. All in all, however, by the metrics of predictability and absence-of-policy-by-presidential-ego-and-whim, China under Xi is surely a more predictable great power, and in many ways a less threatening great power to the nations of the world, than the U.S. under Trump. 

A Politico–Public First poll taken earlier this spring of residents of four of America’s leading longtime allies—France, Canada, Germany, and the U.K.—showed each now views China as a more reliable partner than the U.S. under Trump. More than any of his other actions, Trump’s attacks on such longstanding democratic allies as Denmark and Canada have compelled all such allies to question America’s ideological underpinnings, and whether they are still the foundation on which our foreign policy rests. Where other U.S. presidents had surely deviated from the liberal and democratic criteria by which we’ve officially judged other nations, no president before Trump had ever repudiated—actually, trashed—them.

So it should not have been surprising that when asked whether it was better for their countries to depend on China or the U.S. under Trump, 57 percent of Canadian respondents answered “China,” compared to 23 percent who answered “America.” Germans favored China 40 percent to the U.S. 24 percent; the French preferred China too, with 34 percent to the U.S. 25 percent; and Brits said China 42 percent to the U.S. 34 percent. Most said that this wasn’t so much because China had become more reliable as that the U.S. had become less so. Trump had dismissed as yesterday’s news the ideological and economic ties that had linked the U.S. with its postwar allies, supplanting those links with ties based solely on their nations’ fealty to him. Compared to a post-democratic, neo-personalist America, totalitarian China was a rock of stability.  

Respondents also said it would be easier to reduce their reliance on the U.S. than their reliance on China, since China has become by far the world’s leading manufacturer and exporter of products. (For which, we have Wall Street, Presidents Reagan, Papa Bush, and Clinton to thank more than we do Trump.) As to quantity, so to quality: By wide margins, respondents in all four countries said that China now had more advanced technology than the U.S. Fifty-five percent of Germans said that China led in advanced technology, while just 30 percent said the U.S. did. In Canada, the margin was China 54 percent, U.S 37 percent; in the U.K., it was China 53 percent, U.S. 35 percent; and in France, China 50 percent, U.S. 36 percent.

All this may be a little unfair to Trump, who by thought and action is clearly committed to making America the undisputed champion of 19th and 20th century technologies. His preference for coal and oil, combined with his opposition to solar, wind, and electric power, has positioned China to dominate the world’s EV market just as the U.S. once dominated the world market in gas-powered cars. It has made the United States even more vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of fossil fuels, even as other nations busily transition to cleaner power sources for reasons both environmental, economic, and strategic. As China sells its EVs to the world, Trump’s America will be cornering the market in tailfins. 

Much as its air will be needlessly dirty, America’s discourse will be needlessly dumber. Trump’s hostility to both immigrants and universities, not to mention academic independence and basic empiricism, has driven scientists and scholars from our shores and reduced the research capacities of those still here. China’s Xi is no fan of free inquiry, either, but unlike Trump, he is neither enamored of obsolete forms of energy and production, nor committed to dumbing down science. Like any rational head of government, he views scientific capacity and advances as metrics of national strength and power.

Trump, MAGA, and the Republican Party harbor no such dangerous views; they threaten the ancient shibboleths, biases, and intolerances at the core of their beliefs and behaviors. Nor do they view the preservation and extension of democracy as a value that’s foundational to either foreign or domestic policy: Democracy, after all, can be a powerful and lamentable constraint on the ruler’s will. Xi, of course, is even less democratically inclined than Trump and his followers, but that’s not the reason behind our allies and much of the planet turning to China rather than the U.S. Rather, it’s that Trump has driven them, reluctantly and provisionally, into China’s arms. The once and ostensibly anti-Communist Republican Party has been transformed into the hand puppet of Donald Trump, who arguably is doing more to boost China’s fortunes and power than anyone since Kublai Khan.