How Will President Trump Deal with China's Leader Xi Jinping?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

An intensely nationalistic state, a resurgent China is set to face a new American president who seems willing to confront it economically and perhaps militarily. Beijing will certainly be up for the battle.

For all but the period known to the Chinese as the “century of humiliation” -- from the First Opium War in 1839 to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 -- when European and Japanese imperialism overturned the existing order, China was at the center of East Asia for thousands of years.

Other states in the region acknowledged its dominance via the tribute system. But then China was humbled and invaded, with large areas under foreign control or domination.

Consequently, much of Beijing’s foreign policy in the past seven decades has been about restoring the country’s rightful place at the center of regional, and perhaps global, affairs.

Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China is aiming to become the paramount power in the South China and East China seas, a worrisome development to its neighbours -- in particular, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

It has been engaged in “island building” as a means of asserting sovereignty over wide stretches of maritime territory.

Xi, the son of a first-generation Communist leader, has become the most powerful Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping and perhaps even Mao Zedong.

Last year, Xi became commander-in-chief of the Chinese armed forces. At the Communist Party Congress in 2012 he had already been chosen as the general secretary of the party. Four months later, Xi stepped into the state presidency.

He is also chair of the Central Military Commission, and is modernizing and re-organizing China’s armed forces.

Xi is projecting China’s power into the wider world. He has made numerous foreign state visits in recent years, and launched the “One Belt, One Road” programme to spread Chinese influence through Asia and into Europe. China now has major economic ties with states throughout Africa as well.

But China’s expansion into the seas of East and South Asia has led to regional instability, now compounded by uncertainties about how Trump’s administration will act.

Trump has been in contact with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, predictably angering Beijing, which considers the island Chinese territory. Washington cut formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979, recognizing the Communist mainland rulers in Beijing as the sole government of “One China.”

Trump also invited Taiwanese representatives to his inauguration. Former premier Yu Shyi-kun led an 11-strong team to the ceremony, and remarked that U.S.-Taiwan ties were at an “historic high.”

The new secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has warned China about its expansionist policies.

“We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that first, the island-building stops, and second, your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed,” he told members of the U.S. Senate Jan. 11.

Washington has long asked China to halt its massive dredging and island building in the disputed waters of the South China Sea. But Tillerson’s warning that the United States would block China’s access to the contested islands could raise the danger of a military clash.

As author and Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash wrote in London’s Guardian newspaper Jan. 21, “do Trump and Xi have the wisdom, statecraft, sound advice and, not least, domestic political elbow room to step back from the brink?”