Trump and Xi: The honeymoon is over

By John Pomfret 

Freaks: Trump with Xi Jinping during a bilateral meeting at Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach, Fla., on April 6.

Is Trump’s surprisingly friendly start in relations with China coming to an end? 

Relations with Beijing appear destined for rocky times unless China begins to modify some of its long-standing policies.

On North Korea, over the past week, the Trump administration has put China on notice that its efforts to reign in Kim Jong Un’s nuclear ambitions are not enough. 

In a tweet earlier this week, Trump, in classic passive-aggressive mode, said, “While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!” 

On Wednesday that was followed up by a press conference with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. 

Tillerson reiterated that China has “a diplomatic responsibility to exert much greater economic and diplomatic pressure on the regime if they want to prevent further escalation in the region.” 

These statements came not simply after a series of North Korean missile tests, but also following the North Korean regime’s incarceration and killing of U.S. citizen Otto Warmbier.
This week, the Trump administration also dismissed suggestions by China and South Korea for a freeze on U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises in exchange for a North Korean freeze on its nuclear and missile tests. 

This idea has been criticized by practically every American analyst on all sides of the political spectrum. 

A similar deal was tried in 2005, and North Korea broke the deal in 2006. 

So it’s no coincidence that North Korea still supports it. 

Indeed, also on Wednesday, North Korea’s ambassador to India, Kye Chun-yong, said his country was willing to consider such a freeze.
Trump’s next step is anyone’s guess, but it’s clear that the administration is considering what none of his predecessors had dared to do — penalizing the numerous Chinese companies that are violating U.N. sanctions on North Korea and facilitating its nuclear-weapons program. 

Over the course of the Obama administration, only one such Chinese company was sanctioned.
Problems are also simmering when it comes to Taiwan. 

Before Barack Obama left office, the State Department had prepared an arms sales package to the island, but it had yet to be finalized. 

Wanting to gauge China’s response to North Korea and other issues, the Trump administration had delayed approval. 

With China failing to step up on North Korea, those who back the arms sale within the Trump administration will be emboldened to get this package back on track.
In addition, for years, China has been lobbying the United States to agree to a “fourth communique” on U.S.-China relations. 

The Chinese want to push the United States for a cutoff date for arms sales to Taiwan and to support China’s claim to the island of 23 million people. 

Since 1972, the U.S. position, which successive U.S. administrations have called America’s one-China policy, has been that while it understands that China wants to annex Taiwan, it takes no position on Taiwan’s sovereignty. 

China hopes to change that and earlier this year, Tillerson instructed Brian Hook, the State Department’s director of policy planning, to draw up a memo on the advisability of a fourth communique. 

I’m told the memo laid out the case why a new communique was a horrible idea, a position further strengthened by China’s apparently unwillingness to go the extra mile on North Korea.
Finally, trade and investment issues appear destined to move from the sidelines of the relationship to center stage. 

During the campaign, Trump promised to slap a 45 percent tariff on China’s exports to the United States and to label China a currency manipulator on “day one.” 

Once in office, Trump reversed course and promised better treatment for China if it helped out more on North Korea. 

Now that the prospects for such help appear to be vanishing, a new toughness on the economic side of the relationship is emerging.
Testifying before Congress on Wednesday, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer made the case that any decision to label China a “market economy” would have “cataclysmic” consequences for the World Trade Organization. 

The next day, Lighthizer voiced his disapproval of the Ford Motor Company’s announcement that it planned to move production of its Focus model to China and to export the cars back to the United States. 

Lighthizer also told U.S. senators that his office would be intensifying its enforcement action against Chinese businesses in a variety of cases. 

Speaking about China’s efforts to obtain advanced American technology by forcing U.S. companies to share their trade secrets with potential Chinese competitors in exchange for a piece of China’s market, Lighthizer was blunt: “It’s another example of China trying to take control of a critical industry … there is no ‘reciprocity’ at all, as Chinese companies face nothing like this in the U.S.”
Trump’s “let’s make a deal” approach to China provided Beijing with opportunities for significant wins in its relations with the United States. 

But Beijing so far appears unwilling to embrace Trump’s central argument — that the relationship has been skewed in China’s favor for too long and needs to be reworked.

Trump Believes in Father Christmas

China’s Trump Honeymoon: Unexpected, and at Risk of Ending
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

Il brutto, il cattivo: Trump and Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla., in April.

BEIJING — The short, unexpected honeymoon that China enjoyed with Trump seems to be in trouble, dashing hopes in Beijing that the two countries had embarked on a new, businesslike relationship.
Trump’s assertion that China had failed to pressure North Korea into curbing its nuclear and ballistic missile program means that Beijing must now confront the prospect of a stormier relationship ahead — not just over North Korea but also tougher stands on trade, currency and the South China Sea that Trump set aside as he sought Xi Jinping’s help with Pyongyang.
“While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out,” Trump wrote on Twitter this week, ahead of a high-level meeting of Chinese and American officials on Wednesday in Washington, signaling a harder line.
Trump did not detail what might follow that conclusion, but the options on the table with North Korea — including more coercive sanctions that could target Chinese companies trading with the country, a military buildup and even the use of force — are all deeply objectionable to Beijing.
At the same time, Trump had previously suggested he was holding off on getting tough on China’s trade policies in return for Xi’s help with reining in North Korea, often engaging in public flattery of the leader. 

Now, Xi and his colleagues in Beijing must ask — again — whether Trump is serious about the threats he made on the campaign trail.
The prospect of a rockier relationship is particularly sensitive now as Xi prepares to preside over the Communist Party’s 19th National Party Congress in the fall. 

While Xi’s re-election to a second five-year term as president is not in doubt, he is said to want to use the gathering to consolidate his authority and reshuffle the leadership, and he does not want any foreign crises to be distractions.
“What Trump is saying is, I don’t need you on North Korea now, and therefore maybe we should have it out on these other issues, like trade,” said John Delury, an expert on China and the Koreas at Yonsei University in Seoul.
The official response from China was fairly muted, though strained.
“I have to say that the crux of the Korean Peninsula problem and the focal point of the conflict is not China,” a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Geng Shuang, said at a briefing on Wednesday.
He added: “Resolving the Korean Peninsula issue requires joint efforts, and it won’t work if it depends on China alone.” 

At the same time, he said that “China’s role is indispensable.”

A test of the Pukguksong-2, a ballistic missile, in an undated photo released by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency in February. Trump said that China had failed to pressure North Korea into curbing its nuclear and missile programs. 

The statement by Trump, although couched in appreciative words for Xi, surprised and annoyed Chinese analysts.

China had taken significant steps to tighten trade with the North, they said, and the United States had, as always, not given sanctions enough time to take effect.
“China has done its best, and these sanctions are working,” said Lu Chao, director of the Border Study Institute at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, a government research organization in Shenyang. 

“Given time, they will have a greater impact on the economy.”
Even direct talks with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un — which seem less likely after the death of Otto F. Warmbier, the American college student who was released by North Korea in a coma last week — could leave China without a say in any negotiated outcome.
Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor of international relations at Renmin University of China in Beijing, said that Xi’s government had learned not to take Trump’s Twitter messages at face value.
“The Chinese government assumes Trump’s tweets do not necessarily represent the administration,” he said. 

“The government cannot treat them very seriously. Trump changes all the time.”

He added that the new round of meetings in Washington came at a “very critical period” and that the government would try to sustain the positive momentum of the first few months of the Trump presidency.
Officials in Beijing had expressed confidence that their gestures to Trump — including the lifting on Tuesday of a 14-year embargo on American beef imports — would placate Trump, whose platform as a candidate had signaled a more confrontational policy. 

“Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem?” he wrote in a tweet in April, defending the reversal of a campaign promise.
Xi’s visit in April to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla., underlined the importance China places on relations with the United States, and officials hoped the initial cordiality between the two leaders would establish the sort of nonconfrontational partnership that Beijing prefers.
China’s willingness to help with North Korea — or at least be seen to be helping — became the foundation of that relationship. 

In recent weeks, however, White House officials signaled a growing frustration with Beijing, arguing that Trump’s bet had not paid off. 

The president appears to have reached the same conclusion.
“We understand the Americans are angry over the student’s death,” said Jin Qiangyi, director of the Center for North and South Korea Studies at Yanbian University in Yanbian, near China’s border with North Korea. 

But imposing new sanctions targeting Chinese companies would only lead to more problems, he said.
“The United States may want to smoke North Korea out with sanctions so it would drop its nuclear programs, but we doubt this will work,” he said. 

“This is a country that has managed to go through decades of sanctions with China's help.”