On 17 January, shortly before taking office as US President, Donald Trump had a phone call with Xi Jinping, President of the PRC. Trump later stated that the call went well. Speaking via videoconference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said that he likes Xi and even invited him to attend his presidential inauguration. While Xi did not attend, he sent Vice President Han Zheng in his place. A week later, Marco Rubio, Trump’s newly appointed Secretary of State, requested a call with Wang Yi, China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. According to the Chinese Ministry, Rubio described US-China ties as “the most important bilateral relationship in the 21st century” and crucial for shaping the world’s future. Analyzing the details of this conversation is key to establishing the context for whatever relationship will unfold as the Trump administration begins to enact specific policies. Trump had promised to impose 60 percent tariffs on Chinese trade immediately but has for the moment only imposed 10 percent. Whether this is an attempt to keep face with his voters or a tactical move in a longer-term strategy remains to be seen, as does China’s response and the global consequences. The initial Chinese response has been a cautious tit-for-tat, but the situation is fluid.
Rubio emphasized that “the Trump Administration will pursue a US-PRC relationship that advances U.S. interests and puts the American people first.” At the same time, he reaffirmed US commitments to regional allies and voiced concerns about coercive actions against Taiwan and in the South China Sea, among other key issues. Wang said, “Major countries should act like great powers, shoulder their international responsibilities, safeguard world peace, and help all countries achieve common development,” adding that he hoped the US will play a constructive role (好自为之 haoziweizhi) in the future of the Chinese and American people and for world peace and stability. He also underscored that China “has no intention of overtaking or replacing anyone” and had to “defend our legitimate right to development.”
There is a clear contrast in the priorities outlined in both official summaries. Rubio stressed US interests and “America first,” while Wang focused on global public goods and the right to development. The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, provided more details of Wang’s side of the conversation, highlighting the need to maintain communication, control differences, expand cooperation based on the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation, promote the stable, healthy and sustainable development of China-U.S. relations, and find the right way for China and the United States to get along in the new era.
Wang’s use of a proverbial phrase in Chinese has caused varying and contradictory interpretations in the Western press. The phrase “haoziweizhi” means to rely on one’s own resources and to be careful as well as to behave properly. The official English translation of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs is “I hope you will act accordingly,” while the Xinhua News Agency’s English website said, “Wang hopes Rubio will make the right decisions”. Reuters translated it more ominously as, “I hope you will conduct yourself well and play a constructive role in the future of the Chinese and American people and in world peace and stability.” Fox News followed suit. Newsweek translated it as, “I hope you will take good care of yourself and play a constructive role.”
Wang’s remarks summarized the official line on the priorities of foreign policy and international affairs. Rubio’s remark, although clearly “America first” in tone, was notably milder than the well-known hawkish stance of China’s relations with the US that has him currently banned from entering China. At his confirmation hearing in the US Senate, Rubio said that China is “the most potent and dangerous, near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted,” and observed that the US needs to be more offensive in confronting China or “much of what matters to us on a daily basis—from our security to our health—will be dependent on whether the Chinese allow us to have it or not.” John Ratcliffe, Trump’s Director for the CIA, told his hearing that “China was far and away our top national security threat.” Although Trump claims he has never read the Mandate for Leadership document produced by the ultraconservative Heritage Society think tank’s Project 2025, he has included several of its authors among his appointments and has enacted several executive orders that are identical to some of its recommendations. That document concludes that “China is a totalitarian enemy of the United States, not a strategic partner or fair competitor.”
The official EU stance is more nuanced, seeing China as “a partner for cooperation, an economic competitor and a systemic rival.” Ursula Von Der Leyen’s approach to China at Davos contrasted greatly with Trump’s: “It is time to pursue a more balanced relationship with China, in a spirit of fairness and reciprocity.” But she also echoed a standard line in Western analyses of the changing world order that accuses China of revisionism with regard to the liberal world order: “International trade institutions have often struggled to address the challenges posed by the rise of non-market economies that compete by a different set of rules.” It is not true that China wants to destroy a rules-based world order but it is true that China, together with the “Global South” or BRICS+, does want to reform the rules, precisely along the lines outlined by Wang in his conversation with Rubio: safeguard world peace, help all countries achieve their right to common development, create global public goods, respect the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, win-win cooperation and mutually beneficial trade. The EU stance falls somewhere between Rubio’s advancing US interests and putting the American people first and Wang’s helping all countries achieve common development, as the EU struggles to clarify its own understanding of the need for strategic autonomy regarding the US and the need to de-risk its relations with China.
With Trump back in power in the US, already turbulent times threaten to become even more turbulent. The economist Peter Drucker is often misquoted as having said, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence, is not the turbulence, it’s acting with yesterday’s logic.” He did say, “A time of turbulence is a dangerous time, but its greatest danger is a temptation to deny reality.” Both versions seem particularly relevant to any attempt at analysis of the new Trump administration. His admiration for the presidency of William McKinley is indicative of his acting with yesterday’s logic, promoting a nineteenth-century approach to twenty-first-century complexities: mercantilism, territorial expansion, lack of regulation, free rein to oligarchs, all of which are symptoms of a failure to recognize reality or the temptation to deny it.
US and European establishment economists, political scientists, and foreign policy experts are perplexed by Trump’s inexplicable or inscrutable behavior, so they have great difficulties understanding it, let alone predicting it. As Patrick Smyth wrote, “To suggest…that there is a coherent, well-thought-out ideology driving Trump would be to credit the new president with a capacity for rational and analytical thought well beyond his purely transactional mindset”. David Brooks, taking inspiration from the Italian economist Carlo Cipolla, has used the Trump administration’s earliest executive orders to illustrate “The Six Principles of Stupidity,” defining stupidity as “behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next?” This failure to respect the law of unintended consequences has the Trump administration promulgating decisions that must immediately be rescinded because of the chaos they provoke, imposing tariffs that are immediately lifted because they rebound unfavorably on US interests, threatening a global trade war without thinking through the consequences. The Wall Street Journal called Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico, “The Dumbest Trade War in History”. As Brooks points out, when stupidity is in control, words lose their relation to reality. Since, “the opposite of stupidity is not intelligence, it’s rationality,” it becomes difficult for rational people to understand policies that are stupid: “Because stupid actions do not make sense, they invariably come as a surprise. Reasonable arguments fall on deaf ears. Counter-evidence is brushed aside. Facts are deemed irrelevant.” Trump’s liberties with truth and semantics resemble Humpty Dumpty’s in Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word…it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Alice’s objection that he cannot “make words mean so many different things” receives the reply, “The question is…which is to be master—that’s all.”
As a result of his first term of office, Chinese commentators found an apt analogy for Trump’s behavior in the anarchic and chaotic figure of Sun Wukong, one of the main characters of the classic Journey to the West. As Chip Tsao wrote in 2020, “He is the disruptor of the system, and America’s ‘Monkey King’ (Sun Wukong). … He promises to bring the rest of the world down with him if need be and tears down existing structures, replacing them with the radically new.” Sun Wukong is an example of the “trickster” in anthropological literature, an uncontrollable figure that defies all rules and conventions just for the sake of it and sows chaos everywhere. Trump’s chaotic policy-making decisions resist rational analysis, other than the desire to create chaos.
Beyond Brooks’ examples of stupidity in Trump’s policy decisions, the new administration suffers from ignorance and a lack of experience. Despite Vietnam’s traumatic role in contemporary US history, the new Secretary of Defence could not name a single country that was a member of the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN). Trump himself is often obliviously or perhaps gleefully ignorant, as illustrated by his identifying Spain as a member of the BRICS group of nations. Brooks applies the Dunning-Kruger effect to this phenomenon–“that incompetent people don’t have the skills to recognize their own incompetence”–giving as an example the attempt “to remove civil servants who may or may not be progressive but who have tremendous knowledge in their field of expertise and hire MAGA loyalists who often lack domain knowledge or expertise” (Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr come to mind) and concluding that “the results may not be what the MAGA folks hoped for.”
Cover image: The flag of China is displayed on a mobile screen with the USA flag and Import Tariff in this photo illustration in Brussels, Belgium, on February 2, 2025. (Photo by Jonathan Raa / NurPhoto / NurPhoto via AFP)
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