In the days after Donald Trump’s sensational election victory Chinese foreign policy experts heralded the property tycoon’s triumph as a rare opportunity to recast the often rancorous relationship between Washington and Beijing.
“In everything he is better than Clinton,” commemorated Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations from Shanghai’s Fudan University. “We must welcome him.”
On Monday, as news of Trump’s latest Twitter attack on Beijing filtered through to China, where the social networking site is blocked by Communist party censors, that tune had changed.
“Ignorant. Distasteful,” snapped Shen when asked for his reaction to the president-elect’s 277-character outburst and his incendiary decision to engage with Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen on the telephone last Friday.
Shen, the deputy head of Fudan University’s institute of international affairs, said he had been outraged by Trump’s 10-minute call with the leader of Taiwan, a self-ruled island which China considers a renegade province.
“If he continues to call Taiwan a country we [should] sever relations with him,” the academic fumed. “I don’t know what the government would do [but] I know what I would do: I will close our embassy.”
Shi Yinhong, a Renmin University foreign policy expert, agreed the chances of a bitter and messy rupture between the US and China had increased following Sunday night’s tweets in which Trump again lashed out at Beijing’s alleged currency manipulation and construction of “a massive military complex” in the South China Sea.
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into..
December 4, 2016
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)their country (the U.S. doesn't tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don't think so!
December 4, 2016
“It is still too early to make any assured predictions but I think maybe I can see that a cloudy storm is gathering on the horizon,” Shi said. “This is not good, of course.”
Referring to the billionaire’s latest social media salvo against Beijing, Shi said: “These words should again remind the Chinese media and a large part of Chinese international scholars and even maybe many officials within the Chinese government that their previous estimates of Trump’s disposition and his China policy are too optimistic.”
“The Chinese government, just like most governments in the world, doesn’t know who this Trump is and what kind of policies he will make. But the last week’s events will surely increase the worries in their minds about Donald Trump.”
Many political observers initially dismissed Trump’s decision to hold a phone call with Tsai - the first such call between a US president or president elect and Taiwan’s leader since 1979 - as the latest example of what some see as his rash and ill-informed ventures into the world of international diplomacy.
But some voices are pushing back against that depiction, describing the conversation as a deliberate and calculated move intended to signal that the incoming Republican president was not afraid to play hardball with his Communist party counterparts in Beijing.
“I am 100% certain that this wasn’t an impromptu decision,” one foreign policy specialist with direct knowledge of the call told the Guardian.
The specialist, who declined to be named, said the 10-minute call had been preceded by weeks of discussions by officials working for Trump and Tsai.
In an article for the Fox News website, Stephen Yates, a China expert who some believe helped set up Trump’s call with Tsai, also hinted that the phone call had been a calculated move.
Yates said the conversation was designed to show China - “whose deeply corrupt and authoritarian government is used to getting its way from the United States” - that it could no longer dictate to whom the US president would speak.
Shi, the Renmin University scholar, admitted he was caught in two minds as to the true meaning of Trump’s latest moves.
“On the one hand I don’t believe that he would dare to dramatically change US policy towards Taiwan, even if he wants to… But on the other hand I still think there is a possibility - I don’t know how big - of a hardening of American policy towards China over the Taiwan issue.”
Such a hardening risked making relations between the two countries “very tense”, he warned.
Editorial writers at the Global Times, a Beijing-controlled tabloid, seemed similarly conflicted on Monday morning in an article probing Trump’s “jaw-dropping” decision to talk to Taiwan’s democratically-elected leader.
Already though one definite conclusion could be drawn, the newspaper argued. “China,” it said, “should understand Trump has two faces.”