Xi Jinping’s Trump-sized puzzle

IF TOUGHNESS ALONE decided great-power contests, China could afford to feel cocky about its confrontation with America. Though Chinese exporters have been winded by President Donald Trump’s tariffs, they have yet to suffer a knockout blow. Communist Party bosses have worked to build an economy that can take American-inflicted pain, whether that involves ordering China’s technology sector to become more “self-reliant” and less dependent on foreign inputs, or expanding its dealings with Russia and other countries that oppose Western trade and financial sanctions. The same economy stands ready to impose pain on foreign rivals, for instance by curbing exports of rare-earth minerals, the supply of which China dominates.

Personal toughness matters, too. The party’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, was a hard man when Mr Trump was merely playing one on reality television. As a youth, Mr Xi was exiled to a dirt-walled rural cave, jailed three times and threatened with execution when his family fell foul of Mao-era purges. Those years left him with a bleak view of politics. While still a provincial official, a quarter-century ago, Mr Xi told an interviewer: “What I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the bullpens [a reference to Mao-era detention sites] and how people can blow hot and cold.”

Alas for Mr Xi, internal fortitude is not the only deciding factor in China’s contest with America. Two big disadvantages are sure to weigh on China’s dealings with the wider world. The first involves the party’s rigidity. The second handicap involves an unhelpful flipside of Chinese strength: it frightens others. China is seeking to recruit neighbours and trade partners into a Trump-resisting coalition. But its leaders’ warm words are undercut by the dread their country inspires as a manufacturing juggernaut, and by its taste for economic and military coercion.

China’s system is “too slow” to handle Mr Trump’s “messy” style of statecraft, laments a well-travelled Chinese scholar. It was wrongfooted, early on, by a public invitation for Mr Xi to attend Mr Trump’s inauguration in January. That was an impossible request. Mr Xi is presented to his people as a ruler for the ages: a worthy successor to China’s greatest emperors. He does not attend barbarian ceremonies where he would merely be one of several VIPs. More quietly, Trump aides proposed that Mr Xi send in his stead Cai Qi, his right-hand man in the Politburo’s Standing Committee. Trump aides spurned offers to manage relations via the party’s foreign-policy chief, Wang Yi, who was China’s principal channel to Joe Biden’s administration. But Mr Cai, an austere Xi loyalist and enforcer of his leader’s will, “is not the right person in our system”, explains the scholar. In the end, China sent a largely powerless figurehead, its vice-president, Han Zheng.

Inside Trumpworld senior figures insist that the current trade war is not intended to burn bridges with Mr Xi. Their boss remains open to exploring a grand bargain with his Chinese counterpart, thrashed out leader-to-leader, they say. Yet Mr Xi is not about to pick up the telephone to haggle with an American president on the fly. Chinese officials are even less keen on suggesting that he meet Mr Trump in person for unscripted negotiations. Memories of the Oval Office scolding of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenesky, are too fresh and painful for that. More simply, China’s system cannot send Mr Xi into an open-ended, high-risk summit. Mr Xi may have jailed or toppled rivals and amassed vast power. But he is presented by propaganda chiefs as a sort of supremely wise technocrat-in-chief, guiding a party apparatus that weighs and crafts policies, then enacts them with absolute obedience to the leader. Dignity and authority are at the core of Mr Xi’s brand.

Mr Trump’s breezy style has long disconcerted China’s leaders. In the spring of 2017 he called Mr Xi so often to ask for help with North Korea that Chinese envoys eventually delivered a discreet message to American contacts. Mr Xi is “not our North Korean desk officer”, they pleaded: let underlings handle most of this.

In this second term, Chinese officials are aghast as Mr Trump’s cabinet secretaries offer contradictory justifications for tariffs in duelling television appearances. Amid this chaos, China does not know whom to speak to. It also fears that American interlocutors will leak to the press “and embarrass the top leader here in China”, says the scholar. Nor, reportedly, can Chinese authorities agree whether to link trade talks to the most sensitive dossiers, including curbing sales of Chinese chemicals used to make fentanyl sold to American drug abusers, or the fate of Taiwan. China can be expected to observe factional fights raging in Washington, to see who emerges on top in three or six months. “Then the Chinese side will feel a little bit safer,” the scholar predicts.

China, the bully that talks of friendship

That caution is matched among China’s neighbours, including three South-East Asian countries that are threatened with steep Trump tariffs, and were due to host Mr Xi from April 14th. The Chinese leader talked of jointly defending free trade and resisting “unilateral bullying”. His hosts, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia, could be forgiven some scepticism. All three profit from trade with China but resent how one-sided such commerce can be, as investors bring their own Chinese supply chains and even workers. Some regional governments mutter about imposing defensive tariffs on Chinese goods. Conceivably, Mr Trump may give them political cover to do just that, blaming American arm-twisting.

Few neighbours believe China’s talk of “win-win” outcomes, even if they loathe Mr Trump’s approach: “We win, you lose.” America is rapidly squandering trust built up over many years. But China never enjoyed much trust to begin with. In these friendless times, Chinese toughness is both a strength and a vulnerability. ■