Trump Tracker: 100 Days as Viewed From China (#2)

A close reading of elite Chinese commentary on Trump, Trade and the World

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Last week marked the 100th day since Donald Trump’s inauguration. Prompted by this milestone, we present a new edition of Sinification’s Trump Tracker. The analysis below draws on a close reading of 35 articles published since our last edition on February 21st, which covered the first month of Trump’s second term in office. These 35 articles were selected from a much larger pool, primarily for the quality of their insights (i.e., they go beyond merely echoing official rhetoric) and the institutional affiliation or status of their authors, with a few idiosyncratic contributions included for their distinctive perspectives. We recognise that this selection process is inherently subjective, yet China’s information environment is such that a random sample would likely provide a far less accurate sense of the tenor of debate in China.

— Jacob Mardell

1. Strategic Composure, Not Escalation

• Chinese commentators maintain a tone of sober confidence – muscular and optimistic, but a far cry from the consensus in much of Western analysis that China has already won this round of the trade war.

• “Strategic composure” (战略定力), a phrase used by Wang Jiangyu (王江雨), captures the prevailing mood and the recurrent call for patient, timely decision-making focused on long-term horizons.

• Several authors call for China to “do our own thing well” (办好自己的事). This phrase, common in official rhetoric, reflects a general sense among authors that by putting its own house in order, China can weather external turmoil and outlast U.S. attempts at containment. (E.g. Jin Canrong 金灿荣 here.)

2. Future Stimulus – Where It Should Go

• On how exactly China should do its “own thing well”, authors reflect cautious optimism about China’s monetary and fiscal headroom. Views on where potential stimulus should go are varied:

  • Yu Yongding questions the potential of consumption-led growth, arguing that investment in infrastructure and tech drives long-term growth. He calls China’s capacity for infrastructure investment and construction a “systemic advantage” (制度优势) and suggests targeting elderly care, green energy and urban renovation.

    • It should be noted that Yu Yongding is a prominent advocate of infrastructure-focused development and his emphasis diverges somewhat from the broader discourse in China and Beijing’s latest headline messaging, which puts direct support for consumption at centre stage.

  • Other authors, particularly Li Cheng (李成), call for greater investment in soft infrastructure, including social security, healthcare, education, and public housing.

  • Zhao Yanjing (赵燕菁) argues that beneath tariff skirmishes, the real U.S.-China contest lies in who can rebalance their economy faster. He contends that China should urgently stimulate its capital markets to unlock latent consumption – for example, by funnelling government investment into the stock market.

  • Zhang Ming (张明) also focuses on expanding domestic demand with a fairly orthodox mix of supply-side investments and reform, including: issuing treasury bonds to provide fiscal stimulus; promoting a more unified national market; and reforming income distribution and social welfare .

  • Two authors focus on local government debt and the housing market as bottlenecks, supporting central government-led solutions. Yao Yang (姚洋) calls specifically for 4–5 trillion yuan in local government bonds to clear arrears and a "national team" to purchase 600–700k unsold housing units.

3. Precision Strikes – China’s Options In The Tariff War

• While most authors counsel composure, some also warn against appearing weak. Wang Jiangyu (王江雨), for instance, cautions that “China must not entertain fantasies that softness or concessions will elicit American goodwill”.

• Regarding the more offensive tools in China’s trade war arsenal, commentators continue to counsel precision strikes. Several options stand out:

  • Further targeting of U.S. agricultural exports. (Beijing has implemented several rounds of tariffs on U.S. farm products, but there is room for further measures.)

  • Suspending fentanyl cooperation, (rather than cooperating further, as the Chinese government currently seems willing to do in order to start trade talks.)

  • Restricting U.S. service exports, especially in sectors like consulting and finance, which Jin Canrong (金灿荣) calls a “killer move” (杀招) due to the U.S. surplus in services trade.

  • Investigating U.S. firms' IP rights in China. (Beijing has already launched antitrust investigations into major U.S. tech companies, signalling a willingness to scrutinise U.S. firms.)

• Still, the dominant emphasis remains on anti-tariff, anti-escalation positions that stress the importance of strategic composure. Until recently, China appeared to be following this “precision strike” approach, but Beijing’s sweeping retaliatory tariffs mark a more muscular turn. While no author directly questions this shift, several openly criticise tit-for-tat escalation and the emphasis on precision and moral authority (see below) sits uneasily with Beijing’s recent measures.

4. Free Trade and China’s Moral Authority

• Several authors argue that China should respond to Trump by stepping into the role the U.S. has vacated, upholding free trade and multilateralism and reducing Chinese tariffs even further. Historian Wu Si makes this argument most memorably, invoking the classical concept of “honouring the king and expelling the barbarians” (尊王攘夷) to argue that China should lower its own tariffs so as to project moral authority and win over the Global South.

  • Alongside the argument for internal capital market reform mentioned above, Zhao Yanjing (赵燕菁) highlights external investment as key to China’s structural transformation. He argues that China’s “way out” may be to “export capital and recreate China overseas”, echoing the development trajectories of Britain, the U.S. and Japan.

• Many of the authors mention the Global South as a key driver of export growth, both in recent years and in the future. At least three warn of rising protectionism in the Global South, calling on China to build more sustainable trade relations in order to avoid backlash.

5. Reading the United States: Trump’s China Policy

• On the trajectory of American power, there are two camps:

  • A majority frame U.S. decline as structural and diagnose Trump’s presidency as a symptom of deepening economic, institutional and societal dysfunction. Several highlight intensifying political polarisation, systemic gridlock, and a continuing conservative, racialised turn in U.S. politics.

  • A smaller number warn against underestimating the dynamism of American society and the strength of its capital markets.

• There are also contrasting views on Trumpism itself, sometimes expressed within the same article:

  • A number of authors appear dismayed at Trump’s assault on U.S. and international institutions, tacitly lamenting the collapse of the post-WWII liberal order and implying a break from the past.

  • The majority are deeply critical of Trump. Liu Dian (刘典), who works at Fudan University’s notoriously nationalist China Institute, is particularly scathing, comparing Trump’s loud, but ineffective governance style to a “blunt knife cutting flesh — a lot of action, but not much blood”.

  • At the same time, several commentators see Trump’s foreign policy as an unvarnished, if extreme, continuation of U.S. power politics. (Particularly Zheng Yongnian here.) Similarly, a few authors speculate on the strategic rationale behind tariffs, situating them in historical context.

• There is a similar tension of views on U.S. China policy under Trump:

  • Several authors claim that Trump is not inherently anti-China, while cautioning that China policy might be driven by hawks in his cabinet.

  • Li Cheng (李成) pushes back on this view, arguing that Trump is fundamentally a product of the U.S. political environment and thus hawkish by nature.

  • Though several authors portray Trump as a transactional dealmaker who might be open to negotiation – even on Taiwan – most view U.S. China policy as inevitably hostile and driven by structural dynamics.

6. Speculating on Russia and the Limits of a “Reverse Nixon” Strategy

• Russia comes up frequently, mostly in relation to Trump’s overtures to Moscow over Ukraine. Several authors warn that a U.S.-Russia détente could complicate China’s strategic environment, but most agree that deep mistrust between Russia and the West would complicate any attempt at Trump pulling a “reverse Nixon”.

  • Feng Yujun (冯玉军) offers a particularly striking and heterodox perspective. He describes Russia as driven by “innate insecurity, intense hostility to the outside world, boundless territorial ambitions, and Orthodox messianic strategic culture”, arguing that it poses a long-term threat to global stability. Russia’s hybrid warfare, he writes, has “radicalised social cleavages in the U.S.” and helped install Trump — whom he describes as a “strategic investment” by the Russian deep state.

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