Not long after Donald Trump surprised the world by winning the presidency, a familiar Washington rite began—the courting of power. Within days of the election, a parade of big names auditioning for a job or influence with the new administration arrived at Trump Tower in Manhattan to meet with the president-elect or his senior aides. Camera crews in the marble lobby recorded their comings and goings, which had to be an ego boost to the president-elect. When it came to China policy, says Steve Bannon, the campaign chief who viewed China as a mortal enemy, “everyone who ever ate chop suey” came calling.
None had better credentials than Henry Kissinger, whose secret diplomacy in 1971 paved the way for China to reestablish relations with the United States, rejoin the global trading system, and emerge as American’s greatest rival. At ninety-three years old, Kissinger still had unrivaled access to Chinese leaders and a thriving corporate consulting business that benefited from those contacts. On November 17, 2016, he was ushered into Trump’s office. The president-elect had a message he wanted conveyed to Beijing: “Everything is on the table.”
From one perspective, the message was surprisingly positive coming from a president-elect who had threatened to hit Chinese imports with 45 percent tariffs and who had accused China of rape. But the message had a touch of menace, too. If everything was on the table, that could include China’s claims of sovereignty over islands in the South China Sea, or even Taiwan or Tibet.
Trump told Kissinger that he wanted to establish a personal relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping that would help the two nations solve conflicts. Kissinger said he was scheduled to meet soon with Xi and would deliver the message. On December 2, he did just that. The two men met at the Great Hall of the People, where Xi told Kissinger that he also wanted a fresh relationship. He sought a one-on-one meeting with Trump and was ready to travel to meet him.
Later that day, though, before Kissinger could fly back to New York and deliver the positive response, Trump had a different interchange, which would stun Beijing and call into question whether any Chinese leader could do business with him. Trump took a phone call from Taiwan’s president, the first time a U.S. president or president-elect had spoken to a Taiwanese leader since at least 1979, when the United States broke off diplomatic ties with Taiwan as part of its agreement to recognize China.
The substance of the twelve-minute phone call didn’t seem like much. Taiwan’s president congratulated Trump on his election victory, and the two leaders cited “close economic, political, and security ties,” according to a Trump office statement.
But the symbolism was breathtaking. China views Taiwan as a breakaway province and has never ceded sovereignty. As part of a Kissinger-negotiated deal in 1972 to resume relations between the United States and China, Washington said it accepted there is “one China and that Taiwan is a part of China,” although the United States and China disagreed on what the One China policy entailed.
The Trump call suggested that the new president might be willing to accept Taiwan as an independent entity, perhaps even a sovereign nation. A front-page commentary in the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, warned that “Trump and his transition team ought to recognize that creating trouble for China-U.S. relations is just creating trouble for the U.S. itself.”
For the independence-minded new president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, the call was a big win. Bob Dole, the former Republican senator and presidential nominee, stepped forward to say that his law firm did work for the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office—Taiwan’s U.S. quasi-embassy—and that “we may have had some influence” in arranging the phone call. 1
The full story was both more mundane and troubling because it showed how unprepared the new Trump team was to govern. The president-elect hadn’t decided to jettison the One China policy; he hadn’t approved any China policy at all, other than signaling he was open to a new relationship. A lower-level Trump staffer sympathetic to Taiwan placed the call on an Excel spreadsheet of upcoming telephone calls for the president-elect, fully expecting someone more senior to knock it off the list. No one did.
Bannon, who saw the schedule, liked the idea of shaking up the China relationship, given his distaste for Beijing and his to-the-barricades temperament. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, also reviewed requests from foreign leaders to talk to Trump. Bannon didn’t brief him on the significance of the call or the potential blowback.
A senior White House official said Kushner learned of the call just a few minutes before it was made, and Trump had already decided to go ahead. But another staffer said that Bannon had “cuckolded” Kushner, whom he viewed as a rival. Well, Bannon says, chuckling, “maybe I didn’t fully explain.”2
In any event, Trump wanted to talk to the Taiwan leader. Who was China to tell him who he could talk to? “I don’t give a shit” about Beijing’s reaction, he said, according to staffers.
Trump’s election had stunned Beijing, which had focused during the 2016 campaign on Hillary Clinton’s China aides, including former Obama Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell. China’s ambassador, Cui Tiankai, invited Campbell to his residence in January 2016 for what Campbell described in a memo released by WikiLeaks as a request for “an informal, private, off-the-record get-together with a few of us to discuss the next year and the current state of U.S.-China affairs.”
Clinton had known three generations of Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping. As secretary of state in 2012, she had hosted Xi, who was then vice president, for lunch at the State Department. Xi discussed the difficulty of building a “new type of cooperative partnership” between two countries with such different political systems. “There’s no precedent for us to follow, and no ready experiment for us to refer to,” Xi said.
Whatever difficulties Beijing expected with Clinton were magnified with Trump, whose campaign was an enigma to Chinese leaders. At internal meetings, Xi marveled at Trump’s ability to anticipate shifting voters’ sentiment in the United States and his ability to sway public opinion. Trump’s attacks on China didn’t have much impact on their sentiment; even ordinary Chinese were used to U.S. presidential candidates lambasting China.
Trump actually had plenty of admirers on the mainland. His reality TV show, The Apprentice, was a hit and had spawned local copycats. His perceived directness and decisiveness appealed to Chinese viewers, who dubbed themselves chuan fen, or Trump’s fans.
Chinese leaders, who rarely comment on U.S. elections in public, couldn’t hide their amusement at Trump the candidate. Premier Li Keqiang, at his annual press conference in March 2016, noted that the U.S. election was “lively” and had “caught the eyes of many.” A few, though, were wary. “Trump is an irrational type,” Lou Jiwei, then China’s finance minister, told the Wall Street Journal a month later. 3 “If the U.S. were to do what he proposed, then the U.S. would not be entitled to its position as the world’s major power,” added the blunt-talking Lou.
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The fury of Beijing’s response to Trump’s Taiwan phone call and the criticism of Trump domestically for roiling China relations caught the Trump team by surprise. Beijing was also uncertain how to proceed. “We’re somewhat ill-prepared for the Trump administration,” an official in the Zhongnanhai leadership compound lamented at the time. “How can we get him back on track?”
Chinese officials were accustomed to following long-standing procedures and protocols, not to handling someone as combative and freewheeling as Trump. China had long been the unpredictable partner in the bilateral relationship, and U.S. diplomats sought to understand the intentions of China’s secretive Communist leadership. Now Beijing was in the uncomfortable position of trying to make sense of a mystifying change in U.S. politics.
Beijing dispatched its most senior foreign affairs official, Yang Jiechi, to meet with the Trump team. Yang started out as a factory worker during the Cultural Revolution and later earned a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics. His career blossomed, in part, because of his excellent English. In the 1970s, he worked as an interpreter for George H. W. Bush when the future American president was setting up the U.S. government’s liaison office in Beijing before the two nations established diplomatic relations.
Bush called him “Tiger Yang” because his name contains the Chinese character for tiger, a nickname that other foreign dignitaries used too, including Kissinger. He continued to rise through the ranks in China’s foreign policy establishment after he served as an interpreter to Deng Xiaoping in the 1990s.
On December 9, Yang, Ambassador Cui, Bannon, Kushner, Peter Navarro, and Trump national security aide K. T. McFarland huddled in the 666 Fifth Avenue headquarters of Kushner’s family real estate firm. The Trump team wanted to avoid the camera crews posted at Trump Tower.
“The territorial integrity and sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China is not to be questioned,” Yang began, in what amounted to a two-day lecture. “It was perfect English,” says Bannon. “He never looked at a note, never missed a beat. [It was] actually magnificent.” Then after a short coffee break, Yang repeated his talk nearly word for word, this time reading from papers, which Bannon interpreted as Yang’s need to tell his Beijing superiors that he had delivered the formal message. “That’s how mad 4they were,” Bannon said.
Ultimately, Bannon found Yang’s message “incredibly condescending,” though the Trump aides heard Yang out respectfully. “The Trump people at the time, they listened to us very carefully,” recalls Cui, the Chinese ambassador. “They wanted to learn more about the Chinese position and the sensitivities on issues like the Taiwan issue.”5
The meetings ended on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, so Kushner, an observant Jew, didn’t attend. In his place was retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the campaign’s top national security aide, who was to have a very short-lived career as the Trump White House national security advisor. Relations seemed to be back on an even keel.
The next day, December 11, though, Trump again created an uproar, this time telling Fox News Sunday interviewer Chris Wallace, “I don’t know why we have to be bound by a One China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade.” Trump listed concessions he might require to keep the policy intact: help on North Korea, a revaluation of the yuan so Chinese exports would be less competitive, and a halt to military construction in the South China Sea.
The message was aimed at Beijing: “I don’t want China dictating to me,” he told Wallace. But it reverberated in Taiwan. Did the president-elect consider Taiwan a bargaining chip to be tossed to Beijing as part of some deal? Would he trade Taiwan for more U.S. exports to China?
In less than two weeks, Trump had sent contradictory messages about Taiwan—yes, I’ll take your president’s call because I have some sympathy for Taiwanese sovereignty, but no, don’t count on me defending Taiwan if Beijing offers a great deal. Those contradictory impulses still define Trump, say his national security aides. On some days, he is rankled by China’s insistence that Taiwan is off-limits; on other days, he is rankled that Taiwan is an obstacle to an agreement with China.
A few days later, Trump’s flip-flopping earned him a rebuke from President Obama, who still had a month to go as commander in chief and whose team considered their successors to be amateurs. “If you’re going to upend this [One China] understanding, you have to have thought through what the consequences are because the Chinese won’t treat that like they treat some issues,” Obama told the White House press corps.
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The Trump China team was full of hard-liners with plenty of ideas, but no overall strategy. They listened to the counsel of business leaders with deep China experience, who made pilgrimages to Trump Tower, though they were deeply skeptical of what they heard. Trump aides blamed the China hands for being naïve in their assessment of Beijing; now they would have to deal with China’s unchecked rise. Insurance executive Maurice “Hank” Greenberg was one of the most successful American businessmen in China, although his standing in Washington had plummeted after his American International Group teetered on bankruptcy in 2008 and had to be rescued by the federal government. He was also a multimillion-dollar contributor to Trump’s opponents during the Republican primary, another strike against him.
When Greenberg, then ninety-one years old, met with about a dozen Trump aides, he tried to impress them with the importance of the U.S.-China relationship. Russia and China were America’s two greatest adversaries, he said, and the United States couldn’t afford to take them both on. Continuing to work closely with China made the most sense because it benefited the United States and the global economy, he said. Don’t treat China as an enemy.
Navarro, hot-tempered even when unprovoked, grew red in the face and lashed out at Greenberg. Others in the room got him to back off. Michael Pillsbury, the Hudson Institute China scholar working on the transition, says he told Navarro that Greenberg deserved respect. “You may disagree with him, but Hank landed at Normandy,” he said of the World War II veteran. Says Greenberg of the session: “Navarro was very hostile about China.”6
A meeting with former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson at the General Motors building in midtown Manhattan was friendlier. He laid out for the group his reasons to continue the annual meetings he started, called the Strategic Economic Dialogue. Though Paulson considered the sessions, which brought together a slew of senior Chinese and American officials, crucial to ironing out problems with China, the Obama team found the sessions less useful.
Many Trump advisers considered them an enormous waste of time. In their view, the meetings locked senior officials into legalistic negotiations that did little to change how China operated. Worse, there was no mechanism for enforcing Chinese pledges. Although there was some interest in continuing the efforts among Trump’s more moderate economic advisers, Kushner later told Paulson they weren’t going to go ahead with them.
Before Bannon had turned into a nationalist provocateur, he had a short career at Goldman Sachs, when Paulson was a senior executive. Bannon addressed him as a onetime colleague. How should the Trump team approach governing, he asked Paulson. “Do you think we should do things strategically, one after the other? Or should we just flood the zone and come out with everything all at once?” The surprised Paulson chose the former. “Hank, you’re such an aggressive guy,” Bannon said. “I thought you’d say flood the zone.”
Flood the zone was precisely what the Trump transition team had been thinking.
For Trump’s first workdays in the Oval Office, Navarro was planning an economic and trade offensive. If he had his way, the new president would accuse China of manipulating its currency, a process that could lead to tariffs on Chinese goods; impose tariffs on steel imports, to help the struggling U.S. industry cope with excess production from Chinese mills; and threaten to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement unless Mexico and Canada negotiated a replacement within ninety days.
The Trump team wanted to make Mexico a place where U.S. companies could relocate their China operations, but they first wanted a more advantageous trade deal with Mexico. Bannon was planning an additional provocation: have a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group sail through the Taiwan Strait separating the island from the mainland.
The transition team also put together a China strategy group, including Pillsbury, the Hudson Institute scholar whose book, The Hundred-Year Marathon, controversially argues that the United States is blind to China’s secret plan to overtake it as the global superpower. Bannon carried a dog-eared copy of the Pillsbury book in his backpack and tried—he figured unsuccessfully—to get Trump to read it.
The new team also included Matt Pottinger, who had served in the Marines under General Flynn as an intelligence officer. The boyish-looking Pottinger, in his mid-forties, had an unusual background. From 1998 to 2005, he was a journalist based in China for Reuters and then the Wall Street Journal.
As a reporter, the Mandarin-speaking Pottinger had covered the Chinese energy industry, politics, and Beijing’s cover-up of the SARS epidemic. He was enormously skeptical about Chinese intentions. After leaving the Marines in 2010, he moved to New York City and founded a business investigating Chinese companies for American exporters and investors, where he turned up cases of fraud. That further reinforced his wariness of China’s government and party.
Explaining his decision to leave journalism for the military, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2005 that “living in China also shows you what a nondemocratic country can do to its citizens.
“I’ve seen protesters tackled and beaten by plainclothes police in Tiananmen Square, and I’ve been videotaped by government agents while I was talking to a source,” he continued. “I’ve been arrested and forced to flush my notes down a toilet to keep the police from getting them, and I’ve been punched in the face in a Beijing Starbucks by a government goon who was trying to keep me from investigating a Chinese company’s sale of nuclear fuel to other countries.”7
The China strategy group churned out about a dozen papers on meeting the Chinese challenge, whether in Antarctica (seabed minerals) or deep space (satellite warfare). They focused especially on what some team members called national security “seams”—areas where rules of engagement weren’t clear and China could try to exploit the uncertainty. Wary about possible Chinese surveillance of Trump Tower, the team resolved not to send their work via Wi-Fi, other than to print out papers.
Toward the end of the transition, Pottinger put together a ten-page paper on overall strategy and briefed the president-elect that he shouldn’t expect engagement alone to bring about economic and political liberalization. The new administration needed to increase pressure on Beijing economically and diplomatically.
“The key is actually getting leverage on China,” Bannon emailed Pillsbury on December 20.
By the time Trump took office on January 20, 2017, none of the work was ready to execute. Only one proposal went into effect.
On workday number one, Trump scrapped U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade pact of a dozen Pacific Rim nations, including Japan. That agreement spelled out rules that the United States someday hoped would hem in China economically. They included requirements that state-owned enterprises operate like commercial ones, antitrust policy not be used arbitrarily to punish companies, and data be allowed to flow freely across borders and not be blocked by something like the Great Firewall of China.
Trump had argued during his campaign that TPP was yet another trade deal that encouraged U.S. companies to move factories offshore. The Trump trade team feared that China’s auto industry would get a huge boost by shipping auto parts to Japan and other TPP nations, where they would be assembled into automobiles and shipped to the United States, tariff-free.
But Trump’s national security advisors saw the scrapping of TPP as a lost opportunity. The trade pact would have strengthened ties with Japan, which they considered a frontline state in any clash with China.
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One idea broached during the transition did immediately carry over to the new administration: a one-on-one meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping.
Trump had marketed himself to the American public as a deal maker since at least his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal. He saw himself as a businessman who could pull off agreements that eluded others. During the campaign, he was careful not to attack Xi personally; all blame went to his predecessors, who had let China get away with murder. He needed to meet Xi to gauge what kind of guy he was and how best to deal with him.
Xi suggested he was open to such a meeting, Kissinger told Trump when they conferred again on December 6. Around that time, John Thornton, a former Goldman Sachs senior executive, also met with Trump and encouraged him to move ahead with a meeting.
Thornton had been responsible for Goldman’s China business and developed deep ties among Beijing’s Communist Party elite. They included Wang Qishan, whom Xi Jinping had entrusted to run his anticorruption campaign and then appointed vice president. Thornton was also one of the few Goldman Sachs alumni whom Bannon still admired, and he helped Thornton get an audience with Trump. Though Thornton was a Democrat, he was excited that Trump was promising to put China at the center of his new administration’s agenda.
“You must have a relationship of trust with Xi Jinping,” Thornton advised the president-elect. “Invite him and his wife to Mar-a-Lago and make it entirely personal. Get to know each other and what your visions are for your countries.” Xi’s personal history, he told Trump, was like a metaphor for modern Chinese history. Trump liked the idea. “Let’s do it,” he ordered Bannon.
But Trump’s disparagement of the One China policy had complicated a possible meeting. Beijing sought out an ally among the Trump team and turned to Kushner as a go-between, a role he readily embraced. Both Trump and Xi rely on a small circle of trusted advisers. China’s tightly controlled media built up Kushner, calling him America’s “first son-in-law,” and in reference to his slim build, “a fresh breeze in the world of potbellied CEOs.”
Kushner was aware he was being courted and tried not to put the Chinese too much at ease. Kissinger had advised him earlier that foreign nations would be nervous about Trump because of his America First campaign and because they knew so little about him. “Don’t make them not nervous because that could be a real strategic advantage for President Trump,” Kissinger advised.
Beijing demanded that Trump make clear his support for the policy before Xi would meet with him. Beijing was pushing Trump to back off, and he did, despite his tough talk about China.
In December, after consulting again with Kissinger, the Trump team turned down a proposed meeting with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious leader whom China views as an enemy. The following month, Pillsbury, the Trump China team member, published an article in the National Interest called “Trump Can Stand Up to China Without Sparking War.” Trump didn’t plan to change the One China policy, he argued, and hinted that the president-elect opposed selling Taiwan F-35 stealth fighters.
Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump, helped out, too. On February 1, 2017, shortly after the inauguration, she attended a Chinese New Year celebration at Beijing’s embassy in Washington. The next day, she posted a video of her daughter, Arabella, singing a New Year’s song in Mandarin, which went viral in China.
On February 9, Trump made his first phone call to President Xi after taking office. In a highly scripted exchange, negotiated by Kushner and Ambassador Cui, Xi said to Trump: “I would like you to uphold the One China policy.”
“At your request, I will do that,” the U.S. president replied.
Trump then invited him to Mar-a-Lago, as prearranged, and Xi accepted. The decks were cleared for the summit.
Before they met, though, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was wary of any U.S.-China détente, got his own Mar-a-Lago meeting. To make sure nothing went wrong, Abe consulted with psychologists for advice on dealing with Trump. “He strongly dislikes being told what he does not know,” one of the psychologists said, according to a Nikkei report. 8
The mid-February meeting went well. The two men played golf at Trump’s Florida resort and plotted a response to a North Korea missile test while sitting in a Mar-a-Lago dining room. Club members gawked and took mobile phone videos.
With the Abe session out of the way, Ambassador Cui sent Kushner drafts of a joint statement that China and the United States could issue after President Xi and President Trump met in Florida. 9
Elsewhere, the two nations’ top officials were growing closer, too. In March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made his first trip to Beijing since taking office. Before meeting with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, Tillerson described the basis for U.S.-China ties as “nonconflict, nonconfrontation, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation.” That was the exact language used by Xi in 2013 to define a “new model of great power relations” between the two nations. The choice of words stunned many in Washington while pleasing Tillerson’s Chinese hosts.
Kushner played a role in Tillerson’s choice of words. Says a White House official: “Diplomats love to get hung up on the wording when the actions are a lot more important and relevant.”
Xi and his stylish wife, Peng Liyuan, a prominent folk singer in China, arrived at Mar-a-Lago on April 6. Beijing did all it could to make sure the meeting would be a success. In the past, Chinese leaders announced purchases of Boeing aircraft at such occasions—sometimes taking credit for purchases they had announced earlier. This time, on the day Xi touched down in Florida, Beijing approved three of thirty-six product trademarks that Ivanka Trump had applied for in 2016, beginning a pattern of approving Ivanka trademarks before important trade events. (A Chinese government spokesman said the decision simply reflected “the principle of giving equal protection to foreign trademark holders.”)
After a series of internal fights at the White House about whether to turn the meeting into a formal summit, the Thornton idea of a friendly encounter carried the day. Eighteen honor guards lined up to salute the leaders. Chinese and American flags flapped in the breeze.
The two leaders spent hours together at teas, working lunches, walks around the compound, and chats on elegant sofas. The first ladies visited Bak Middle School of the Arts in West Palm Beach to watch student performances. The Kushner children, five-year-old Arabella and her three-year-old brother Joseph, were wheeled out to sing a Chinese folk song, “Jasmine Flower,” for Xi and his wife. “Mr. Trump was at his convivial best,” reported the Straits Times of Singapore.
The agenda for the meeting was clear from the planning sessions. Trump wanted to convince his Chinese counterpart to narrow the United States’ vast trade deficit with China, and to police Chinese companies that trade with North Korea in order to hobble Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs. Xi wanted to stabilize the bilateral relationship so he could focus on assuring his dominance in a Communist Party leadership reshuffle scheduled for late 2017.
The two leaders bonded over military action. As they ate dessert, the president confided to Xi that he was about to launch fifty-nine missiles at targets in Syria in retaliation for a gas attack by the Assad regime on Syrian rebels. “We had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you have ever seen,” Trump later said. “And President Xi was enjoying it.” During their conversations, Xi explained the long, tangled history of China and Korea. Before that, Trump later said he thought Beijing could easily take care of any North Korean threat. “But after listening for ten minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” he said later.10
The leaders even did some business. They agreed to create the United States–China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue, which was Trump’s version of Hank Paulson’s Strategic Economic Dialogue. Officials from both sides would work on “an ambitious agenda and meeting scheduled to show progress and demonstrate meaningful results.” The negotiations were to cover national security, law enforcement, cybersecurity, and social and cultural issues. But the heart of the new talks was the Comprehensive Economic Dialogue, bureaucratic-speak for trade negotiations. The only difference with past efforts was a short deadline—just one hundred days to show “meaningful results.”
President Trump appointed his longtime business ally Wilbur Ross to oversee the trade portion. Trump called Ross, whom he had made Commerce secretary, one of his “killers”—the awesome negotiators who would, like Trump’s campaign motto, make America great again. Ross seemed cut out for the job. As a private equity investor, he had made money when Washington turned to protectionism and he had made money when it turned to free trade.
In 2002, when President George W. Bush imposed steel tariffs, Ross bought bankrupt steelmaker LTV Corporation and merged it with Bethlehem Steel, Weirton Steel, and Acme Steel to form International Steel Group. He took the company public in 2003 and sold it later for $4.5 billion. Ross started scooping up steel companies before Bush decided to go ahead with tariffs and says he lobbied the administration to adopt protection.
When Congress passed the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which eliminated tariffs with Central American nations and the Dominican Republic, his textile firm, International Textile Group, shipped factory jobs to Nicaragua. CAFTA passed the House by two votes in 2005; opponents blamed Ross’s lobbying for making the difference. It was the kind of trade deal that Donald Trump had spent the presidential campaign attacking as a job destroyer.
“I think I helped” get the trade deal approved, says Ross in an interview. “I testified quite a bit for it.” He defends CAFTA because the United States generally runs a trade surplus with the six CAFTA nations.11
Despite the bonhomie of the Mar-a-Lago meeting, Beijing started to prepare for the worst. China’s Commerce Ministry assigned a senior economist at a government think tank to lead a study on the impact of a U.S.-China trade war. Pei Changhong, director-general of the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, often gets tapped by government agencies for advice on trade and investment issues.
“The entire cabinet picked by Trump seem to be China hawks,” said a Chinese policy maker at the time. “We need to be prepared for the high likelihood of increased trade frictions with the U.S.”