Donald Trump Changed the Game With China. Now He Could Win It.

Opinion|Trump Changed the Game With China. Now He Could Win It.

Donald Trump’s first term signaled a historic shift in U.S. policy toward China. His strategic blend of economic pressure, unpredictability, sanctions and tariffs knocked Beijing off balance. It was a turning point: Washington moved from passive acceptance of China’s revisionist ambitions to assertive opposition. The Biden administration has wisely maintained and in some cases expanded on this framework.

Mr. Trump’s second term could help America to win this strategic contest altogether.

China faces an array of challenges, especially a stagnating economy, making it vulnerable to the president-elect’s assertive tactics. If Mr. Trump can couple the blustery style of his first term with a more focused strategy and tighter discipline, the next four years are a golden opportunity to keep Beijing on the defensive and permanently transform the rivalry in America’s favor.

For China, the ideal outcome in the U.S. election would have been another four years of the Biden-Harris administration’s cautious approach. Although President Biden maintained targeted pressure on Beijing, his emphasis on détente and aversion to escalation would have afforded China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the predictability he needs to address his domestic troubles and advance China’s ambitions in critical areas such as technology, trade and the future of Taiwan.

But Mr. Trump isn’t content with merely managing the competition with Beijing. He aims to win it. His zero-sum approach and unconventional tactics — as well as an emerging cabinet of China hawks — are likely to deny Mr. Xi the breathing room he desperately needs and push the Chinese leader into a high-stakes test of wills he cannot easily control or predict.

Despite a decade of projecting outward strength, China is, in fact, a declining power, its rise having been undone by Mr. Xi’s mismanagement, heavy-handed repression and strategic blunders. The country faces crippling debt, record-high youth unemployment and a shrinking, rapidly aging population. His ideology-driven approach, which places the Chinese Communist Party at the heart of economic decision making, has eroded business confidence, spurred capital flight and led to unprecedented drops in foreign investment. China’s era of sky-high growth is giving way to a stagnation reminiscent of Japan’s so-called lost decade, a period of deflation and economic inertia from which Japan has yet to fully recover. Even Mr. Xi cautioned citizens last year to be prepared to “eat bitterness,” a Chinese phrase signaling hard times ahead.

The U.S. economy, meanwhile, is gaining momentum, and Mr. Trump — who views China’s centrally planned, manufacturing-heavy model as predatory and harmful to American workers — seems ready to aggressively leverage U.S. strength, as he did in his first term. He has proposed tariffs as high as 60 percent on Chinese imports, which, according to some estimates, could shave up to two percentage points off China’s gross domestic product.