The Growing U.S.-China Conflict: Why, and Now What?

Zhiqun Zhu

Security, Asia

Donald Trump is bent on “fixing” the problems between China and the United States, but he has not addressed the root causes of the problem.

The trade war between the United States and China launched by President Donald Trump has been escalating in recent weeks with Trump threatening to raise tariffs on all Chinese imports and declaring a national emergency shutting Huawei out of the U.S. market. Observers of U.S.-China relations have become increasingly concerned about the future of this most consequential bilateral relationship. Why has the relationship deteriorated? What exactly went wrong? And how can the two powers step out of the dilemma?

First of all, it is wrong to assume that Trump is solely responsible for the current status of the U.S.-China relationship. He exacerbated the tensions but did not start it.

Since President Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972, a general consensus within the United States has been that an open and prosperous China is in the U.S. interest. This provided the foundation for engagement with China since then. Major setbacks in the relationship such as the 1989 Tiananmen incident, the 1999 U.S. bombing of Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and the 2001 EP-3 mid-air collision in Hainan did not derail the relationship. Along the way, there has been a genuine American hope that China will become “more like us” as it is more integrated into the U.S.-led liberal international system. As China quickly emerged to be the second largest economy by the end of the 2010s while maintaining its one-party authoritarianism, Americans began to feel disappointed, uneasy, and threatened. The new consensus is that China has become a grave challenge, even a threat to the United States.

During President Barack Obama’s second term, the United States began to seriously address the China challenge. A “pivot” or “rebalance to Asia” was Obama’s hallmark approach to China. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was a key architect of this approach. For this reason, as well as her loud criticism of China’s human rights record, the Chinese government and many Chinese people preferred Trump to Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.