The Trump Effect: China’s New Thoughts on the United States

Abstract

Over the past several decades, the United States adopted a policy of engagement to encourage China to join the US-dominated international system and to shape China’s development direction. Meanwhile, for achieving modernization, China endeavored to integrate into the West-dominated international system. On this point, the United States and China together constructed a grand consensus on “integration-engagement” in bilateral relations. However, after the 2008 global financial crisis, the “integration-engagement” framework began to collapse due to two major factors. The first was a change in China’s foreign policy, which was criticized to be more assertive. China not only began to more openly display its national power on issues related to the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China Seas, but it also demonstrated the scope of its international ambitions through the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The second was that, as a result of China’s strength and foreign policy changes, many American elites began to alter their perception of China around 2015, viewing the engagement policy as a failure and believing that the United States should adjust its China strategy. During Trump’s presidency, the fundamentals of US-China relations changed, and China was clearly defined as a strategic competitor. To compete with China more vigorously, the Trump administration conducted a policy of maximum pressure, hoping to force China to compromise on a series of issues. Theoretically, maximum pressure is a classic strategy of coercive