Two weeks after U. S. President Donald Trump was inaugurated, promising to pursue an “America First” approach to the United States’ economic relations with the world, China may finally be coming around to the reality that it’ll have to talk to the United States about trade concerns.
So far, China has avoided directly addressing Donald Trump’s repeated accusations that Beijing is deliberately weakening its currency to benefit its exporters (it is, in fact, doing the opposite, fearing capital flight) and engaging in manipulative trade practices. The latter accusation isn’t entirely new to Trump; for instance, the Obama administration’s U. S. trade representative criticized China for a range of protectionist practices in the 2016 U. S. National Trade Estimate report.
China’s go-to messaging when asked about the Trump administration’s comments on trade so far has been to emphasize “win-win” possibilities. For instance, in the first press conference following Trump’s inauguration, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying cautioned that trade was “mutually beneficial in nature,” and that “trade wars or confrontation will produce no winner, but only harm the interests of both and all parties.”
This language echoed Chinese President Xi Jinping’s own defense of trade between nations at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
