On January 15, 2020, a spring-like day in Washington D.C., President Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He met at the White House to sign the phase-one deal that signaled a halt to economic hostilities between the world’s two superpowers. Twenty-one years earlier, President Clinton and Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji met close by, in the rococo Old Executive Office Building, for a very different purpose. There the U.S. leader announced that trade talks had failed; a humiliated yet defiant Zhu was leaving Washington empty-handed.
The Clinton-Zhu encounter turned out to be a temporary setback. By the end of 1999, the two sides signed a deal to ease the way for China to join the World Trade Organization. That agreement transformed the Chinese economy and helped turn China into an economic juggernaut. It also cemented relations between the two nations, though cracks quickly developed and would deepen and fracture during the trade war under President Trump.
Now Trump was trying to pour fresh cement into the fissures to repair the damage. While the trade deal he was signing promised big purchases of U.S. goods and some reforms of the Chinese economy, the results were probably too little and too late to prevent the two nations from splitting further apart. The United States and China weren’t quite enemies yet, but they were moving steadily in that direction. Although the trade battle was easing, the Trump administration—and Congress—were looking for ways to block China’s technological and military advances. Chinese students and researchers, once welcomed in the United States, which saw immigration as a source of strength, now were treated with suspicion.
From the Chinese perspective, the United States had turned from a model to emulate, at least economically, into an adversary. The nearly two-year battle had revealed to many Chinese Washington’s desire to thwart their country’s ascent.
Early in the Trump administration, some among Beijing’s political and business elites hoped they could use the American trade offensive to prod China to make market reforms they supported. “We talked about two old men helping push forward China’s reforms. One was Deng Xiaoping,” says a prominent Chinese economist who consults with the leadership. “The other was Donald Trump.”
By the time both sides inked the January 15 deal, that hope had vanished. Trump was seen as just another American politician who wanted to contain China. His bullying tactics became an excuse for the Chinese leadership to double down on its state-led economic model.
The powerful forces ripping apart the relationship were palpable in the White House’s ornate East Room, where hundreds of guests and press crowded to witness the signing, including the book’s co-author Lingling. The president had repeatedly announced that Xi Jinping would come for the signing, which would have given the event more pizzazz. But Beijing dispatched Xi’s self-effacing chief negotiator, Liu, instead. The Communist leadership wanted to shield its top man from criticism that he was giving in to U.S. pressure.
The lower-level Chinese representation didn’t seem to faze Trump, who was in full P. T. Barnum mode. Instead of parading Hottentots and Zulus, as Barnum would have, the president used his Chinese guests as props. They stood behind him on a stage for nearly an hour and a half as he mugged for the cameras.
The president said he would be “going over to China in the not-too-distant future.” Then he thanked more than eighty people, celebrating some, tweaking others, and making inside jokes. He called out nearly a dozen members of his administration. They were “fantastic,” “incredible,” “a legend,” “the best guy.” “Our brilliant Jared,” he said of his son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, who helped bridge the gap between the two sides in the final rounds of negotiations.
His shout-outs revealed much about the status of his guests. The first nonpolitician he recognized was casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the $20 million Trump contributor, and his wife. “Tremendous supporters” and “great people,” he said.
Next was his trade guru Lou Dobbs—“The great Lou Dobbs,” the president said. What made him so great? Dobbs’s assessment that Trump was “the greatest” of all presidents.
“I said [to Dobbs], ‘Does that include Washington and Lincoln?’” Trump said, to laughter. “And he said yes. Now, I don’t know if he was for real, but that’s OK.”
Those two came ahead of Henry Kissinger, who along with President Nixon opened China to the West. “He knows more than probably everybody in this room put together,” Trump said of Kissinger. Then came Michael Pillsbury, his favorite China expert, followed by Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, another big contributor. The president teased Schwarzman for wanting a settlement so badly. “I’m surprised you’re not actually sitting on the edge of the stage,” Trump said.
On it went while the Chinese delegation, who all speak English, watched silently and occasionally clapped and nodded to guests. “This is a bit too much,” a Chinese journalist standing in the back of the packed East Room murmured to Lingling, referring to Trump’s prolonged introduction. “Show some respect.”
When Liu finally got a chance to talk, almost fifty minutes into the performance, he spoke in Mandarin. Liu had spoken in English when he met Trump earlier during his negotiating trips but that had been frowned upon at home. Some in China thought he appeared humbled by the American president.
Similar criticism had been leveled against Premier Zhu two decades earlier when he met with President Clinton, though Zhu managed to save face at home by traveling across America immediately afterward and meeting with business groups. He won support for China’s WTO bid with his blunt and unscripted speeches, laced with humor.
Liu first read a letter from Xi Jinping to the American president. “I will stay in close touch with you personally,” the Chinese leader wrote. The letter was as significant for what it didn’t say—he hadn’t yet agreed to a Trump visit to China.
Then, reading from prepared remarks, Liu said he hoped the deal would improve relations, despite the big differences between the two nations.
“China has developed a political system and a model of economic development that suits its national reality,” a Chinese aide translated. “This doesn’t mean China and the United States cannot work together. On the contrary, our two countries share enormous common commercial interests, and we are faced with multiple challenges like terrorism, counter-narcotics, widening income gap,” and other global problems. At one point during Liu’s speech, the Chinese delegation in the audience showered him with applause as if to show the Chinese side was not resigned to playing second fiddle.
The president responded with Trumpian bluster. “It just doesn’t get any bigger than this—not only in terms of a deal, but really in terms of what it represents,” he said. “Keeping these two giant and powerful nations together in harmony is so important for the world.”
Then the two men signed the ninety-page accord.
For Lingling, the event was perhaps the richest episode in her family’s transformation. Just two generations earlier, her grandfather, Zhong Guang, a Communist revolutionary, had looked after Mao’s health during the Long March and lived in cavelike dugouts along with the Chairman.
Zhong’s sole interaction with an American was in 1936 when he met journalist Edgar Snow, who had traveled to the Communist base in Yan’an, a remote and mountainous area in northern China, to interview Mao and other party leaders. Snow’s book, Red Star Over China, based on that experience, contrasted the spartan, disciplined lives of the Communist guerrillas with the gloom and corruption of the Nationalist government, an account that made Snow’s reputation but was later seen as propaganda by a sympathetic journalist.
Years later, during the Korean War, Zhong would tell his four children, including Lingling’s mother, how friendly Snow seemed to be. That’s how he believed most Americans were. “The War to Resist America and Aid Korea,” he said to his children, using the Chinese name for the conflict, was meant for the “American hegemony, not the American people.” His only other tie to America was a Parker fountain pen given to him by Mao. After Mao’s death, it was retrieved from him by party officials who wanted control of any Mao artifacts.
Zhong had a chance to see the outside world in 1946, soon after the allied victory over Japan during World War II, when the party decided to send him to the Soviet Union to study medicine. In a rare show of independence to party elders, Zhong intentionally missed his flight to Moscow. He wanted to build a New China, not study in a foreign culture.
Zhong, who died in 1973, six years after his release from the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, never got to see China open up to the rest of the world. He would have been astonished that his granddaughter would have benefited so greatly that she would wind up covering a momentous event from what he would have viewed as the epicenter of U.S. hegemony, the White House.
“Your grandfather would be very proud of you,” Lina, Lingling’s mother, told her as she returned from the signing ceremony in Washington. “You’re there for history.”
Two months later, Lingling found herself in a very different situation. She had to hand in her press credentials and leave the country within weeks. This is the country generations of her family helped build and which she considers her homeland.
With the coronavirus pandemic, her six-year-old son had been trapped at home with her for two months along with her mother who was recovering from pneumonia. Her father and husband were locked down elsewhere. She felt helpless and frightened about the future, but her family rallied. They collectively decided that she should return to New York and continue to write about China for the Journal.
Bob’s experience during the signing was different. He was at the Wall Street Journal’s Washington office, scrambling to put together a story for the Journal’s website. Back in 1999, covering the Clinton-Zhu press conference was simpler. Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company, had reporters whose sole responsibility was feeding the Dow Jones Newswires, which competed with Reuters and produced stories minute-by-minute. Wall Street Journal reporters, like Bob, had to worry only about the next day’s story and filed by around 6 p.m. From the vantage point of 2020, it was a leisurely pace, though it didn’t seem so at the time.
At 10:32 a.m., a colleague obtained a copy of the agreement, which was embargoed until the president signed it. That was scheduled for about 11:30 a.m., but as Trump turned the event into a spectacle, the signing slipped to 1 p.m. During this time, Bob was furiously combing through the document, scanning feeds from other reporters, and fielding phone calls from editors to try to produce a coherent and accurate story to run when the president finally stopped talking and signed the text. At one point, 160 unread emails piled up.
This was the part of journalism that most resembled manufacturing. Take a memo from one reporter, merge it with another, add some paragraphs from your own reporting, work in suggestions from editors, and produce a finished story. Not all that different in structure from how his father, Mad Mike Davis, the factory man bankrupted by Asian competition, made luggage. Only his father assembled final goods from fabric, wood, and metal, not from words.
Mike Davis would have looked at the deal skeptically, Bob was certain. He was a Democrat to his bones and would have criticized Trump politically. When he moved to Republican western Pennsylvania in the 1970s, he loved tweaking the conservatives who ran the company where he wound up working. Over drinks—there were always too many drinks—he would bait and tease them about politics.
In many ways, though, he was like the president. He was thoroughly a New Yorker. If Donald Trump was the last of the Mad Men generation, always looking for an angle or a big score, as Trump adviser Steve Bannon said, Mike Davis was close behind. He surely would have used the deal to try to nab a consulting gig to design some luggage or reconfigure a factory floor. But he would have been disappointed. Luggage production had fled to Asia. There was nothing in this partial deal that would reverse that. U.S. tariffs on components imported from China remained in place, as did Chinese tariffs on U.S. exports. The wage gap between the United States and China remained as steep as it was before the trade war began. Animosity between the two nations was steeper.
But Mike Davis would have loved the idea that his son was recording the event for the Wall Street Journal—writing the first draft of a powerful moment in history. He would have loved the action. He even probably would have thanked Trump, privately at least, for giving his son the opportunity to be a witness.
The trade war between the United States and China will deeply affect the lives of people in both nations. It will be studied by generations of historians. Whatever current and future readers may decide about this battle, we hope this book provides the material to understand what happened and why, and to make better, wiser judgments.