The Week Donald Trump Lost the South China Sea

Vietnam's capitulation shows China's neighbors fear the U.S. no longer has their backs.
BY BILL HAYTON

Vietnam’s history is full of heroic tales of resistance to China.

But this month Hanoi bent the knee to Beijing, humiliated in a contest over who controls the South China Sea, the most disputed waterway in the world. 

Hanoi has been looking to Washington for implicit backing to see off Beijing’s threats. 

At the same time, the Trump administration demonstrated that it does not understand and sufficiently care about the interests of its friends and potential partners in Southeast Asia to protect them against China. 

Southeast Asian governments will conclude that the United States does not have their backs. 

And while Washington eats itself over Russian spies and health care debates, one of the world’s most crucial regions is slipping into Beijing’s hands.
There’s no tenser set of waters in the world than the South China Sea. 

For the last few years, China and its neighbors have been bluffing, threatening, cajoling, and suing for control of its resources. 

In June, Vietnam made an assertive move. 

After two and a half years of delay, it finally granted Talisman Vietnam (a subsidiary of the Spanish energy firm Repsol) permission to drill for gas at the very edge of Hanoi’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the South China Sea.
Under mainstream interpretations of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Vietnam was well within its rights to do so. 

Under China’s idiosyncratic interpretation, it was not. 

China has never even put forward a clear claim to that piece of seabed. 

On July 25, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang would only urge “the relevant party to cease the relevant unilateral infringing activities” — but without saying what they actually were. 

In the absence of official clarity, Chinese lawyers and official think tanks have suggested two main interpretations.
China may be claiming “historic rights” to this part of the sea on the grounds that it has always been part of the Chinese domain (something obviously contested by all the other South China Sea claimants, as well as neutral historians). 

Alternatively, it may be claiming that the Spratly Islands — the collection of islets, reefs, and rocks off the coasts of Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines — are entitled as a group to their own EEZ. 

An international arbitration tribunal in The Hague, however, ruled these claims incompatible with UNCLOS a year ago. 

China has refused to recognize both the tribunal and its ruling.
In mid-June, Talisman Vietnam set out to drill a deepwater “appraisal well” in Block 136-03 on what insiders believe is a billion-dollar gas field, only 50 miles from an existing Repsol operation. 

The Vietnamese government knew there was a risk that China might try to interfere and sent out coast guard ships and other apparently civilian vessels to protect the drillship.
At first, China’s intervention was relatively diplomatic. 

The vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, Gen. Fan Changlong, visited Hanoi on June 18 and demanded an end to the drilling. 

When Vietnam refused, he cancelled a joint meeting on border security (the 4th Border Defense Friendly Exchange) and went home.
Reports from Hanoi (which have been confirmed by similar reports, from different sources, to the Australia-based analyst Carlyle Thayer) say that, shortly afterward, the Vietnamese ambassador in Beijing was summoned to the Chinese Foreign Ministry and told, bluntly, that unless the drilling stopped and Vietnam promised never to drill in that part of the sea ever again, China would take military action against Vietnamese bases in the South China Sea.
This is a dramatic threat, but it is not unprecedented. 

While researching my book on the South China Sea, I was told by a former BP executive that China had made similar threats to that company when it was operating off the coast of Vietnam in early 2007. 

Fu Ying, then the Chinese ambassador in London, told BP’s CEO at the time, Tony Hayward, that she could not guarantee the safety of BP employees if the company did not abandon its operations in the South China Sea. 

BP immediately agreed and over the following months withdrew from its offshore Vietnam operations. 

I asked Fu about this at a dinner in Beijing in 2014, and she replied, “I did what I did because I have great respect for BP and did not want it to get into trouble.”
Vietnam occupies around 28 outposts in the Spratly Islands. 

Some are established on natural islands, but many are isolated blockhouses on remote reefs. According to Thayer, 15 are simply platforms on legs: more like place markers than military installations. 

They would be all but impossible to defend from a serious attack. 

China demonstrated this with attacks on Vietnamese positions in the Paracel Islands in 1974 and in a battle over Johnson South Reef in the Spratlys in 1988. 

Both incidents ended with casualties for Vietnam and territorial gains for China. 

There are rumors, entirely unconfirmed, that there was a shooting incident near one of these platforms in June. 

If true, this may have been a more serious warning from Beijing to Hanoi.
Meanwhile, the drillship Deepsea Metro I had found exactly what Repsol was looking for: a handsome discovery — mainly gas but with some oil. 

The company thought there could be more and kept on drilling. 

It hoped to reach the designated total depth of the well by the end of July.
Back in Hanoi, the Politburo met to discuss what to do. 

Low oil prices and declining production from the country’s existing offshore fields were hurting the government budget. 

The country needed cheap energy to fuel its economic growth and keep the Communist Party in power — but, at the same time, it was deeply dependent on trade with China.
It is all but impossible to know for sure how big decisions are made in Vietnam, but the version apparently told to Repsol was that the Politburo was deeply split. 

Of its 19 members, 17 favored calling China’s bluff. 

Only two disagreed, but they were the most influential figures at the table: the general secretary of the party, Nguyen Phu Trong, and Defense Minister Ngo Xuan Lich.
After two acrimonious meetings in mid-July, the decision was made: Vietnam would kowtow to Beijing and end the drilling. 

According to the same sources, the winning argument was that the Trump administration could not be relied upon to come to Hanoi’s assistance in the event of a confrontation with China. 

Reportedly, the mood was rueful. 

If Hillary Clinton had been sitting in the White House, Repsol executives were apparently told, she would have understood the stakes and everything would have been different.
The faith in Clinton isn’t surprising. 

Her interventions on behalf of the Southeast Asian claimant states, starting in Hanoi at the July 2010 meeting of the ASEAN Regional Forum, are well remembered in the region. 

The Barack Obama administration’s focus on the regional rules-based order was welcomed by governments fearful of domination by either the United States or China.
That said, some U.S. observers are skeptical that any other administration would have been more forthcoming. 

Bonnie Glaser, the director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, questions this apparent contrast: “What would the U.S. have done differently [under Obama]? I find it unlikely that the U.S. would militarily defend Vietnam against China. Vietnam isn’t an ally.”
Yet it wouldn’t have taken much: a statement or two about the rules-based order and the importance of abiding by UNCLOS, some coincidental naval exercises during the weeks of the drilling, perhaps even some gunnery practice in the region of Block 136-03 and a few quiet words between Washington and Beijing. 

“Forward-deployed diplomacy,” as it used to be called. 

The Obama administration warned Beijing off the Scarborough Shoal in April 2016 this way. 

Has Donald Trump’s Washington forgotten the dark art of deterrence?
The implications of China’s victory are obvious. 

Regardless of international law, China is going to set the rules in the South China Sea. 

It is going to apply its own version of history, its own version of “shared” ownership, and it will dictate who can exploit which resources. 

If Vietnam, which has at least the beginnings of a credible naval deterrent, can be intimidated, then so can every other country in the region, not least the Philippines.
This month, Manila announced its intention to drill for the potentially huge gas field that lies under the Reed Bank in the South China Sea. 

The desire to exploit those reserves (before the country’s main gas field at Malampaya runs out in a few years’ time) was the main reason for the Philippines to initiate the arbitration proceedings in The Hague. 

The Philippines won a near total legal victory in that case, but since taking office just over a year ago, Rodrigo Duterte has downplayed its importance. 

He appears to have been intimidated: preferring to appeal to China for financial aid rather than assert his country’s maritime claims.
In May, Duterte told an audience in Manila that Xi Jinping had warned him there would be war if the Philippines tried to exploit the gas reserves that the Hague tribunal had ruled belonged to his country. Last week, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was in the Philippine capital to discuss “joint development” of those energy resources.
Where Duterte and the Vietnamese leadership go, others will follow. 

Southeast Asian governments have reached one major conclusion from President Trump’s first six months: The United States is not prepared to put skin in the game. 

What is the point of all those freedom of navigation operations to maintain UNCLOS if, when push comes to shove, Washington does not support the countries that are on the receiving end of Chinese pressure?
Why has Washington been so inept? 

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson knows the stakes well. 

His former company ExxonMobil is also investigating a massive gas prospect in disputed waters. 

The “Blue Whale” field lies in Block 118, farther north and closer to Vietnam’s coast than Repsol’s discovery — but also contested by China. 

Like so much else, it’s a mystery whether this is a deliberate choice by the Trump White House not to get involved in the details of the disputes or if it is a reflection of the decimation of the State Department’s capabilities, with so many senior posts vacant and so many middle-ranking staff leaving.
The most worrying possibility would be that Tillerson failed to act out of the desire to see his former commercial rival, Repsol, fail so that his former employer, ExxonMobil, could obtain greater leverage in the Vietnamese energy market. 

But what government would ever trust Tillerson again?
Repsol is currently plugging its highly successful appraisal well with cement and preparing to sail away from a total investment of more than $300 million. 

Reports from the region say a Chinese seismic survey vessel, the HYSY760, protected by a small flotilla, is on its way to the same area to examine the prospects for itself. 

UNCLOS has been upended, and the rules-based order has been diminished. 

This wasn’t inevitable nor a fait accompli. 

If Hanoi thought Washington had its back, China could have been deterred — and the credibility of the United States in the region strengthened. 

Instead, Trump has left the region drifting in the direction of Beijing.

China Cancels Military Meeting With Vietnam Over Territorial Dispute

By MIKE IVES

One of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. A Chinese delegation unexpectedly cut short a trip to Vietnam after tempers flared during a closed-door discussion on disputed territories in the region.

HONG KONG — State-run newspapers in Vietnam and China reported in recent days that senior military officials from the two countries would hold a fence-mending gathering along a border where their militaries fought a brief but bloody war in 1979.
But Tuesday, the scheduled start of the gathering, came and went without any of the coverage in the state news media that readers in the two countries had expected. 

The Chinese Defense Ministry later said in a terse statement that it had canceled the event “for reasons related to working arrangements.”
Analysts, citing government sources, said that the Chinese delegation had unexpectedly cut short a trip to Vietnam after tempers flared during a closed-door discussion on disputed territories in the South China Sea.
The cancellation is highly unusual for the two Communist neighbors, and it comes as Beijing continues to build artificial islands in the South China Sea, where the Chinese seek to expand their military influence at a time of uncertainty over Trump’s policies in the region.

“This was not what the Vietnamese expected from a polite guest,” said Alexander L. Vuving, a Vietnam specialist at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii.

“You can say both sides miscalculated,” he added. 

But another interpretation is that both countries are “very committed to showing the other their own resolve” on matters of territorial sovereignty.
The dispute happened during a visit to Hanoi this week by Gen. Fan Changlong of China. 

It was unclear what precisely roiled his meeting with Vietnamese officials, much less whether the general’s actions had been planned.
Analysts said he appeared to have been angry over Vietnam’s recent efforts to promote strategic cooperation with the United States and Japan. 

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc recently visited those two countries in quick succession, and the Vietnamese and Japanese coast guards conducted joint drills in the South China Sea last week focused on preventing illegal fishing.
Another reason, analysts said, could be Vietnam’s apparent refusal to abandon oil and gas exploration in areas of the South China Sea that both it and Beijing claim.
Mr. Vuving said a specific source of the dispute may have been the so-called Blue Whale project, a gas-drilling venture in the South China Sea by Vietnam’s state oil company, PetroVietnam, and Exxon Mobil. 

The companies signed an agreement during a January trip to Hanoi by John Kerry, the secretary of the state at the time.
The drilling site, which is expected to produce gas for power generation by 2023, is close to the disputed Paracel Islands and near the “nine dash line” that shows expansive territorial claims on Chinese maps. 

Mr. Vuving said that China probably resents that Vietnam has formed a partnership with an American oil company, particularly one whose previous chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, is Trump’s secretary of state.
The project appears to set a “very damaging precedent for China’s strategy in the South China Sea,” Mr. Vuving said.
The Chinese and Vietnamese Foreign Ministries did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday, and an Exxon Mobil spokeswoman in Singapore could not be reached for comment.
Other analysts said that the source of tension may have been Vietnam’s recent decision to resume oil exploration in another disputed part of the South China Sea.
Carl Thayer, a longtime analyst of the Vietnamese military and emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales, said that if General Fan had indeed asked Vietnam to cease oil exploration in that area, Vietnam would have considered the request “inflammatory”; it would have implied Chinese territorial control in the Exclusive Economic Zone off the Vietnamese coast.
“Vietnam’s leaders would have refused this request and responded by reasserting Vietnam’s sovereignty,” Mr. Thayer said in an email to reporters and diplomats.
There were unconfirmed reports on Wednesday that China had recently deployed 40 vessels and several military transport aircraft to the area. 

Vietnam accused Chinese ships of cutting the cables of one of its seismic survey vessels there in 2011.
Though China is Vietnam’s largest trading partner and a longtime ideological ally, the neighbors have long been at odds over competing claims to rocks, islands and offshore oil and gas blocks in the South China Sea, which Vietnam calls the East Sea.
Tensions came to a head in 2014, when a state-run Chinese company towed an oil rig near the Paracel Islands and within about 120 nautical miles of Vietnam. 

No one was killed at sea, but a maritime standoff led to anti-China riots near foreign-invested factories in central and southern Vietnam, bringing relations between the countries to their lowest point in years.
A few days before General Fan’s Hanoi visit, Mr. Vuving said, China moved the same oil rig to a position in the South China Sea that is near the midway point between the Chinese and Vietnamese coasts, apparently seeking to pressure Vietnam to cease oil and gas exploration in disputed waters. 

Data from myship.com, a website affiliated with the Chinese Transport Ministry, showed that the rig has been about 70 nautical miles south of China and 120 nautical miles northeast of Vietnam over the past week.
The first fence-mending gathering, called the Vietnam-China Border Defense Friendship Exchange Program, took place in 2014 and was intended to promote bilateral trust. 

The meeting this week was expected to include a drill on fighting cross-border crime.
Xu Liping, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing who specializes in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, said that the countries were expected to disagree over territorial claims in the South China Sea. 

But they have established frameworks to defuse disagreements through government channels as well as through the two countries’ Communist parties, he added.
In the end, the two countries “will come out and resolve this problem since both want stability,” Mr. Xu said.
Le Hong Hiep, a research fellow at the Iseas Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, agreed with that conclusion, but warned that new tensions could emerge in the short term. 

China appears increasingly eager to stop Vietnam from growing too close to Japan and the United States, he said.
“As Vietnam tries to achieve its economic growth targets, it is planning to exploit more oil from the South China Sea,” Mr. Hiep wrote in an email. 

“As such, the chance for confrontation at sea may also increase.”

Exxon-Vietnam gas deal to test Tillerson’s diplomacy

The multi-billion dollar joint energy project comes amid past Chinese threats and tough Trump administration talk on the South China Sea
By HELEN CLARK

Former ExxonMobil executive Rex Tillerson testifies during his confirmation hearing for Secretary of State before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington, DC, January 11, 2017. 

US energy giant Exxon Mobil and state-owned PetroVietnam agreed this month to develop Vietnam’s largest natural gas-fired power generation project, a US$10 billion joint venture known as ‘Blue Whale’ (Ca Voi Xanh).

The deal, signed while outgoing US Secretary of State John Kerry was on his last official visit to Vietnam, threatens to create new ripples in the contested South China Sea under the new Donald Trump administration.
The project is scheduled to come online in 2023 and will draw on a natural gas field situated 88 kilometers from Vietnam’s central Quang Nam province in the South China Sea. 

The field is estimated to hold some 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas, three times the amount of Vietnam’s current largest gas project, a joint venture with Russia’s Gazprom in the southern Con Son Basin.
Exxon Mobil will construct an 88-kilometer sea-to-shore pipeline, while PetroVietnam’s Exploration Production Corporation (PVEC) subsidiary will build gas treatment and four power plants with a total capacity of 3 gigawatts, according to reports. 

A planned expansion phase will generate enough gas for another 5,750 megawatts of power and petrochemical production, the reports said. 

PetroVietnam estimates the project will produce US$20 billion for state coffers over an undefined timeline.
The deal comes against the backdrop of Trump’s decision to scrap the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a US-initiated trade pact of 12 Pacific Rim countries of which Vietnam stood the most to gain. 

The tariff-slashing deal, if it had been implemented, projected to boost Vietnam’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 11%, or US$36 billion, and exports by 28% over the decade spanning 2015-2025. Vietnam is a signatory to the China-led Regional Cooperative Economic Partnership, which does not require the same type of economic reforms that TPP would have required.
The ExxonMobil project will have a strong diplomatic defender in US Secretary of State designate Rex Tillerson, Exxon Mobil’s former chairman and chief executive officer. 

Two days before Kerry met with Vietnamese leaders, Tillerson threatened China over the South China Sea, saying in a Senate confirmation hearing that the Trump administration would send Beijing a “clear signal” and “block” China’s access to artificial islands it has built in international waters.
While within Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), the deepwater field is also in an area China claims on its nine-dash map, which lays wide-ranging claim to 90% of the entire South China Sea. 

In 2011, China indirectly warned Exxon Mobil soon after the company announced a big gas find at Block 118, contained in the Blue Whale project zone, saying foreign companies should refrain from exploration in the "contested" area. 

Other multinational energy companies appeared to buckle under China’s pressure by abandoning their exploration activities with Vietnam.
China has also explored in the same area and is believed to have discovered its first commercially viable store of fuel in the South China Sea. 

In mid-2014, state-run China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) positioned a massive deepwater exploration rig in the contested area, setting off sea skirmishes and sparking anti-China riots in Vietnam that resulted in arson attacks on Chinese factories and the exodus of hundreds of fearful Chinese.

Tillerson and CNOOC chairman Wang Yilin met in Beijing on May 14, 2014, where the two executives discussed “further cooperation” between the two firms without giving specific details, according to a Reuters report. 

After those closed door talks, neither side announced any production plans in the area until this month’s Exxon Mobil-PetroVietnam deal. 

Exxon Mobil also has exploration rights to blocks that could be "contested" in adjoining areas.
Vietnam expert Carlyle Thayer wrote in a January 16 background briefing paper on the deal that Tillerson “would have institutional knowledge of Chinese attempts to intimidate Exxon Mobil from investing in Vietnam dating back to 2007-8” and that the businessman-cum-envoy “will not be receptive to Chinese protests at the Exxon Mobil deal with PetroVietnam.” 

Thayer wrote that Chinese officials had previously privately warned Western oil companies that their interests in China would suffer if they assisted Vietnam’s exploration ambitions.
China has not commented specifically on the multi-billion dollar Blue Whale deal, though mouthpiece media has blasted Tillerson’s Senate confirmation comments on the South China Sea. The China Daily said in a January 13 op-ed that Tillerson’s remarks were “a mish-mash of naivety, shortsightedness, worn-out prejudices and unrealistic political fantasies.” 

The Exxon Mobil-PetroVietnam venture was announced while Kerry was in Hanoi and Vietnam Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong was in Beijing meeting with Xi Jinping, where the two signed a joint communiqué on cooperation and peace. 

The pro forma agreement is not expected to resolve or even mitigate the South China Sea disputes.
Hanoi and Beijing maintain a wide network of cooperative ties and agreements despite their South China Sea disputes. 

Whether these agreements, including a joint steering committee to oversee relations, help to restrain bilateral ructions or are useless in the face of serious disputes, such as China’s 2014 incursion into Vietnam’s EEZ, is difficult to say due to the opaque nature of both nominally communist regimes.

This handout photo taken on June 23, 2014 shows a Chinese boat (L) ramming a Vietnamese vessel (R) in contested waters near China’s deep sea drilling rig in the South China Sea.
Bilateral ties cratered after the 2014 anti-Chinese riots and relations were not reset until November 2015, when Xi Jinping visited Hanoi. 

During Xi’s visit a dozen new bilateral agreements were signed under a comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership where China promised US$157 million worth of investments for hospitals and schools and US$500 million for infrastructure.
The sea disputes have been accentuated and complicated by recent joint exploration ventures Hanoi has entered into with foreign energy concerns. 

The deals have also added new geostrategic dimensions to the volatile region. 

For instance, India’s drive to sell Hanoi advanced missiles and other power-projecting weaponry is believed to be motivated in part to protect its ONGC Videsh Ltd energy company’s joint exploration ventures with Vietnam in the South China Sea.
China’s threat to Vietnam’s exploration activities in the area, however, is as much about political power as natural resources. 

U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimated in 2013 that the South China Sea holds 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, including both proven and possible reserves. China’s estimates for the sea are higher, with the state-run China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) projecting 125 billion barrels of oil and 500 trillion cubic feet of gas. 

China consumed around 1.7 billion barrels of oil in 2015, according to industry estimates.
Like China, Vietnam sorely needs the energy to fuel its fast expanding industrializing economy. 

The Exxon Mobil deal is believed to be part of a broad Vietnamese central plan to integrate its coastal economy with natural resources in its EEZ, according to academic Thayer’s briefing paper. 

Those designs for contested maritime areas riled China in the past and will likely do so again if Tillerson backs his tough language with firm action in the South China Sea.

Exxon deal with Vietnam adds to Tillerson’s tangles with China

"You’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." -- Rex Tillerson

By Stuart Leavenworth

Donald Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of State, former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington on Wednesday, Jan. 11.

Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil CEO tapped to be the Trump administration’s secretary of state, created an international stir this week when he told a Senate confirmation hearing that the United States should prevent the Chinese military from accessing artificial islands Beijing has constructed in the South China Sea.
But it’s not the first time he’s riled China. 

Under his leadership, Exxon has teamed up with Vietnam, China’s enemy to the south, to develop natural gas projects in waters claimed by both Hanoi and Beijing. 

On Friday, Exxon signed one of those deals with Vietnam. 

Ironically, it was Secretary of State John Kerry who made the announcement.
“Our countries have worked hard to put the past into the past and to define a different future,” Kerry said at meeting in Hanoi with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. 

“We are now cooperating on security issues . . . and just today a $5 million agreement was signed with Exxon to explore and develop gas and fuel possibilities.”
The agreement allows Vietnam and Exxon to go forward with “Blue Whale,” Vietnam’s largest natural gas and oil project and one that would be built in disputed waters. 

The project is expected to fuel four power plants in Vietnam when it is completed by 2023.
China has not sat by as Vietnam has exercised its energy rights off its coast. 

In 2014, China placed an exploratory rig near Vietnam, setting off skirmishes between fishing boats and the Chinese coast guard.
If Tillerson were to be confirmed as the top U.S. diplomat, and if China responded strongly to the Blue Whale project, he would be in the akward position of either involving himself in an Exxon project he helped developed, or staying on the sides of a budding crisis in the South China Sea.
During his confirmation hearing, Tillerson was anything but guarded in his comments about China, which has been dredging sand onto barely submerged reefs in the region and developing airfields and deep harbors on some. 

Beijing asserts that most of the South China Sea is its "historic" territory, a claim rejected by an international tribunal last year.
Under questioning from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tillerson said that China’s actions in the South China Sea were “extremely worrisome” and comparable to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
“You’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,” said Tillerson.
Chinese state media reacted strongly to his statements, including criticism that China hasn’t been a reliable partner in pressuring North Korea.
“Such remarks are not worth taking seriously because they are a mish-mash of naivety, shortsightedness, worn-out prejudices, and unrealistic political fantasies. Should he act on them in the real world, it would be disastrous,” said an opinion column in the China Daily on Friday.
U.S.-China relations are likely to become tense under Trump. 

On the campaign trail, Trump has accused China of “raping” the United States and has threatened to slap Chinese goods with a 35 percent tariff if Beijing doesn’t change its ways.
So far, Chinese officials have been less bellicose than state media in responding to Trump.