In this light, it's worth revisiting what China for its part actually hopes and expects from its evolving US partnership, and broaching the tantalizing possibility that Trump - for all his tough-on-China rhetoric - is exactly the answer to Beijing's prayers.
New model of big power relations - that wasn't
The present juncture of Sino-US relations can be traced back to the June 7, 2013 summit meeting between new Chinese president Xi Jinping and newly reelected US president Barack Obama. At the Sunnylands retreat resort in California, the two leaders were deliberately set up for an informal suit-and-tie-less strolling chat to gain an initial mutual trust and rapport.
The most significant tidbit to emerge from this confidence-building encounter was Xi's suggestion of a "new paradigm of big power relations" between the US and China, which seemed vague and highly generalized at the time, but was afterwards broadly understood to mean a high degree of cooperation despite irreconcilable differences of worldview and values that make long-term bilateral tension impossible to ever conclusively resolve.
Indeed, around that time (2012-13), it was widely speculated in foreign policy intelligentsia on both sides of the Pacific - though more markedly on the American - that the US and China were inevitably heading to some major great power or superpower competition for global supremacy. Never before in history, it was said, had an incumbent power and a rising one ever managed to get along without feeling so mutually threatened by the other that they weren't finally compelled to resort to strategic hedging in the form of buildups of both arms and rival geopolitical alliance networks; this so-called "Thucydides trap" was a whirlpool so hard to avoid being sucked into precisely because of the self-reinforcing nature of mutual suspicion and insecurity. As Athens was to Sparta and Wilhelmine Germany was to Great Britain, so China now appeared to be to the US.
Over and against this doomsday-like thinking, though it's widely forgotten, the up-and-coming new Chinese strongman Xi Jinping offered a far more benign and seemingly enlightened alternative view: no, the US and China simply weren't condemned to the age-old conflict, because the cost-benefit calculations on both sides were already so predisposed to peaceful and harmonious coexistence, and would in fact continue to be so.
Needless to say, as Xi burnished his credentials as a tough, no-nonsense authoritarian in the mold of a Mao-lite, his benign, even sanguinely confident appraisal of the US-China relationship were perceived as inconsistent with his broader worldview, and so deeply and fundamentally at odds with the apparently far darker vision of China itself that he exhibited in his zero-tolerance attitude towards dissent (both within and outside the party and state), that for a time it could be dismissed by even cerebral observers as little more than sweet talk - just a new terminology for the stale cliché of "win-win cooperation" (itself a phrase he had a particular penchant for).
Indeed, by 2015, when a stumbling Chinese economy was seized on by Xi to consolidate even more personal power at the expense of the rule-by-consensus model for top party leaders since the Deng Xiaoping era, it was no longer possible to even pretend that perhaps this "princeling" of the "red second generation" could actually have any warm feeling whatsoever towards either America or the West as a whole. The entire world could now see his handiwork of a combination of orthodox communist retrenchment and Putinesque revanchist nationalism: he had declared open ideological war on Western "universal values", cracked down hard on independent civil society and religious practice, and seemed to yield not an inch on Chinese territorial expansion and hegemonic economic and political influence in the region, especially with regards to its smaller Southeast Asia neighbors which watched helplessly as Beijing turned partially submerged reefs into floating fortresses in the South China Sea. Over and above all this, he had amassed a degree of cult-like adulation from party underlings and official media which would have been unimaginable for a top Chinese leader a few short years before, when some liberals and reformers were naïve enough to hope against the odds that he was something of a closet democrat.
His sole state visit - in September 2015 - to the Obama-era US was emblematic of this lack and even outright loss of "soft power" by the Chinese communist regime. The awful timing didn't seem to be a coincidence: China's Air Force One touched down at Washington's Andrews Air Force Base with Xi and his photogenic first lady only hours after the Vatican's "Pope Force One" had shuttled out the beloved pontiff, Francis, upon concluding the latter's long-awaited Apostolic pilgrimage to the US. The contrast between the lively, squishy spiritual and moral figurehead, with only faith and words for weapons, and the steely austerity of a tight-fisted dictator, with the world's premier apparatus of massive, systematic state repression, could not have been more pronounced. Then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump decried the imperious way in which Xi strolled into Washington, derisively offering to take him out for a Big Mac in lieu of the meticulously scripted state dinner with the Obamas at the White House; this helped to underscore - on both sides of the Pacific - that Xi was the polar opposite of the Pope: his influence flowed from intimidation and not decency or goodness, and the respect he commanded was not based on anything higher than primal fear, namely the fear of Chinese mercantilist ascendancy, which China's detractors in the West were becoming ever more contemptuous of in their feckless elected leaders. To top it all off, Xi's concluding tour speech to a half-empty UN General Assembly in New York gave the impression of a lonely emperor regurgitating - with more forcefulness, as if that weren't the whole problem to begin with - the same talking points about China's rise and its benefit for the world, merely days after a full crowd sitting in the same chamber was raptured by an inspiring homily of love and mercy in diplomacy by the blessed Vicar of Christ.
Xi's strongman vindication (a la Putin) as harbinger of Trump
But a funny thing has transpired since those awkward days of late 2015 into early 2016 - as recent as they were, yet so distant at the same time. Just when it seemed that Xi's brand of paternalistic authoritarianism was backfiring by wrecking both China's economic prospects and, along with them, its very viability as a one-party state, the new red emperor rolled up his sleeves and crushed his enemies even more ruthlessly and efficiently - and in such a way that it proved he wasn't a power-hungry madman, after all, but rather a patient and prudent ruler who struck out only as a matter of sheer necessity and a cold, detached practicality.
Just a week into 2016, Xi found himself privately rallying internal party loyalists to his personal banner: now was the moment, with hell having finally broken loose as Chinese markets teetered on total meltdown, to take the kid gloves off those vested and factional interests which the previous regime had left behind, wreaking such havoc that it now threatened to bring down the entire party-state hierarchy with their own largely self-inflicted, even self-imposed, crumbling fortunes. Asserting personal control of the national situation, Xi brandished the sword of self-enforcement and self-purification of a wayward bureaucratic apparatus: the special interests and rent seekers of the party and state, especially in the provincial and local administrations and their favored state firms, would still be co-opted to get the economy back on track, but from now on they would suffer severe consequences for shifting the blame for their own intransigence or incompetence in carrying out top-down mandated reforms onto the party center.
By force of fiat, Xi quickly unleashed the levers of a badly delayed fiscal stimulus - a feat that had eluded his premier and head of government, Li Keqiang, who seemed to never have teeth to his edicts. Compromises were inevitably struck - notably, an injunction on graft-prone local government financing was eventually lifted - but Xi's mandate alone got the ball rolling not a moment too soon. China's trillion-dollar stimulus of the first quarter of 2016, which a year later can be credited for saving it from a 2008-style financial collapse, is unmistakably the princeling general secretary's handiwork.
At the time, needless to say, it was much reviled: the last desperate gasp, or indeed "dead panda bounce" as it were, of a terminally ill peculiar system, namely "socialism with Chinese characteristics." But the long-awaited collapse has been incontrovertibly thwarted, and for this the communist regime has plenty of company in its gratitude: not merely the rest of China, but the global economy as well, has been granted a big sigh of relief.
Even worse for Xi's critics both domestically and internationally, the new Mao next conclusively demonstrated his circumspection that he had no laurels to rest on. In the wake of the stimulus that effectively bore his name and catapulted him to seemingly absolute power, his internal enemies - sensing that he was probably serious about "draining the swamp" after all, when the opportunity would truly present itself - struck back in an ill-conceived attempt to blame him for a still highly tense and precarious national condition. In doing so, they betrayed their utter lack of understanding of the big picture and a shocking basic ignorance of financial and economic realities. So accustomed to adoring their own bellies were they that they didn't realize what Xi and his loyalists always knew: that the party center didn't even have to tighten the screws on its apparatchiks in the first place had the latter actually followed orders and loosened their own grips on their subjects. For Xi, control has always been merely the means to eventual liberalization - it has never been an end in itself, as has been exposed to be the case with most of his insubordinate underlings accustomed to looser oversight from above and tighter manipulation down below.
And so, an entirely one-sided power struggle played out in China from March to May last year, wherein Xi all but wiped out any credible internal party resistance to and even dissent from his official policies on the so-called "supply-side restructuring" that had first been touted without the technical catchphrase near the beginning of the Xi-Li administration back in 2013. By mid-May and June 2016, a calm finally began to settle on the Chinese economy from the gradual, belated, but undeniable emergence of a new equilibrium: coordinated by a vigorous central party leadership with Xi himself its "core", the system as a whole exhibited the right combination of growth and reform, of qualitative improvement and quantitative reduction. The key impetus for this was political: at long last, provincial and local party officials who resisted Beijing's mandates for slashing excess industrial capacity were facing serious if still uneven consequences. They could still skirt around their targets and delay unsavory implementations of policy, but the mere fact that overt disobedience or blatant failure now risked harsher discipline from the top meant that they were now looking to cut their eventual losses, rather than continue a futile fight to finally forestall the inevitable.
Strangely, then, just as Vladimir Putin's Russia over the course of 2016 emerged as ahead of the curve in grasping the monumental shift of US domestic politics which propelled Trump to the presidency, so has Xi's China, since roughly the start of the US general election last spring, offered the incoming American leader pointers on how to bring to heel powerful internal vested interests and lobbies. While Trump's public bromance with Putin has generated all the headlines and attention, even more significant is his as yet undisclosed attitude towards and appraisal of Xi's governance of the world's second-biggest economy and quite possibly its true emerging alternate pole to the US-dominated "unipolar" post-Cold War order of the quarter-century after 1989-91.
In both public statements and private talks that have been subsequently disclosed, Trump has made clear that he views China, not Russia, as the main foreign policy challenge for America of the 21st century. On this fundamental point, he does not differ from either Obama or his predecessor, George W. Bush; however, his critical departure from both is a grudgingly realist recognition that the two-decade-long Washington China fantasy - that Beijing could basically be co-opted into a system whose underlying principles are still set by the US - is already sorrily detached from reality. He does not see China as a friend to the US-led post-1945 order - at least not anymore - even if his branding of it as an adversary comes off as mostly rhetoric.
Yet if his warming towards Putinist Russia is any indication, this would be a convergence rather than divergence with Xi's communist regime. Understanding why this is so leads to the initially bizarre assessment that, far from worsening under his watch, Sino-US relations are set for a new boon with Trump at the helm.
In the first place, the Chinese themselves can no longer pretend that they're satisfied with the status quo of American and Western stewardship of global institutions and the global "commons", anyway. They've outgrown the old paradigm, plain and simple; they demand a new one not so much to undermine American leadership but to augment its shortfalls - and its shortfalls are ever more apparently ideological and philosophical in their final origins, borne of an orthodoxy that made far more practical sense when the world was still far more lopsided in being essentially led and run by Western societies and cultures (read: before China's spectacular rise). To Beijing's (and Moscow's) no-nonsense style of diplomacy, it's far worse to try to minimize or downplay these fundamental clashes of core interests and values in the unspoken assumption that they're somehow not such a big deal, than it is to confront them head-on if in a broader context of holistic bilateral and multilateral intercourse; the bottom line being that they're far too big already to still treat as an anomaly or temporary nuisance: the second term of the Obama administration has conclusively proven that the neoliberal West no longer offers the "only game in town" in terms of either markets or policies.
In this telling, the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump's election should be recognized as the final nails in the coffin of the early-1990s "Washington Consensus" of unfettered "free markets" - particularly in the form of cross-border capital flows and capital investments. Well before the West itself pronounced that this unquestioned unitary system was broken, "the Rest" were already suffering its concrete consequences: since the end of US quantitative easing (QE) in 2013-14, they were already mired in a growth slump which steadily snowballed into outright economic contractions for a host of commodity-exporting countries, before finally nearly bringing down the mighty engine of China itself in the aforementioned travails of 2015-16.
Thus if anything, Xi's vindication as Chinese communist strongman has been a harbinger in its own right - a la Putin - for the rise of Donald Trump. Even as vastly contrasted systems built on diametrically opposing values - the West's individual liberty versus the East's collective welfare - China and the US both confront the same underlying problem: how to better distribute - indeed redistribute - the benefits and merits of globalization from those "haves" that are entrenched and ensconced in their privileged access to its modes and levers, to the "have-nots" who, whether real or perceived, have been systematically excluded from the decision-making processes that have produced this universal bifurcation and stratification.
Common goal "trumps" incompatible means - are they really so incompatible, after all?
To conclude, the obvious inference from the above is that Chinese and American objectives are ultimately so deeply and harmoniously identical - a society with such balance and prosperity that it's at peace both at home and with the world - that it's becoming less and less of a stumbling block that their respective means to achieve these are so irreconcilable.
The combination of China's rise and the decline of neoliberalism even on its home turf have revealed that even a system as intrinsically fair and just as America's representative republicanism isn't an end in itself: it's a means to higher and more final objectives. A more perfect union; lasting domestic tranquility - which isn't merely the absence of overt unrest or violence; a general welfare that encompasses all classes and segments of society by leveraging their disparities, not obliterating them; a sense of common purpose and belonging shared by the individual members of the great family that is one's nation-state.
Pluralistic and democratic governance are the said preferred ways that America has always put its faith in to achieve these; whereas effective and authoritative bureaucratic administration has been the millennial Chinese path to said sociopolitical Nirvana. The two parallel tracks can never presume to ever truly intersect - they are by their very nature different beasts. As an American - even as a Chinese - it's difficult to not recognize the inherent intrinsic superiority of the liberty-based US model over the order-based Chinese; even so, the great paradox remains that the imperfections and deficiencies of either paradigm point to the equities and strengths of the other. Just as individual liberty is a function of a collectively observed morality that governs all private conscience, so is collective order a function of the essential latitude that individuals have to optimize their place and position within the public whole, even irrespective of their absolute level of social mobility.
For this reason - that far from detracting from one another, the two parallel tracks actually augment and reinforce one another - the path forward for Sino-US relations couldn't be clearer. Not only does a common goal "trump" the incompatible means taken by the two sides - that's a given - but curiously the disparate means themselves might not even be incompatible at the end of the day, after all.
The platitude of "win-win cooperation" may soon have the most unlikely of new champions: Donald Trump himself. To "win" big - "bigly" or "yugely" that is - for America, as he has promised, he wouldn't mind that Xi Jinping's China "wins", as well. In the final analysis, this competition is one of messaging and marketing rather than of underlying substance - which is precisely why "The Apprentice" Master sees himself as uniquely made for the present moment. Realizing Xi's "new type of great power relations" - not just with China, but with Russia coming along for the ride that turns a "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" triangle into a geopolitical equivalent of ménage à trois - is the only global reality TV show whose starring role befits his ego; with this in the bag, he could just as well Tweet his boredom with running the planet.
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