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    Trump’s Dilemma: A Trade War That Threatens Every Other Negotiation With China

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    President Trump is staking everything on winning by imposing tariffs on China. But the fight threatens to choke off negotiations about other issues like Taiwan, fentanyl, TikTok and more.President Trump came into office sounding as if he were eager to deal with President Xi Jinping of China on the range of issues dividing the world’s two biggest superpowers.He and his aides signaled that they wanted to resolve trade disputes and lower the temperature on Taiwan, curb fentanyl production and get to a deal on TikTok. Perhaps, over time, they could manage a revived nuclear arms race and competition over artificial intelligence.Today it is hard to imagine any of that happening, at least for a year.Mr. Trump’s decision to stake everything on winning a trade war with China threatens to choke off those negotiations before they even begin. And if they do start up, Mr. Trump may be entering them alone, because he has alienated the allies who in recent years had come to a common approach to countering Chinese power.In conversations over the past 10 days, several administration officials, insisting that they could not speak on the record, described a White House deeply divided on how to handle Beijing. The trade war erupted before the many factions inside the administration even had time to stake out their positions, much less decide which issues mattered most.The result was strategic incoherence. Some officials have gone on television to declare that Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Beijing were intended to coerce the world’s second-largest economy into a deal. Others insisted that Mr. Trump was trying to create a self-sufficient American economy, no longer dependent on its chief geopolitical competitor, even if that meant decoupling from the $640 billion in two-way trade in goods and services.Shipping containers in the port of Tianjin, China, last month. Beijing has matched every one of Mr. Trump’s tariff hikes, trying to send the message that it can endure the pain longer than the United States can. The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Has Hinted at a Xi Visit. China Is Still Wondering What He Wants.

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    Chinese experts say Beijing is open to talks but is being stonewalled by the State Department and other official channels.President Trump fueled new speculation this week about a meeting with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, when he told reporters that Washington needed to be cleaned up to prepare for a summit between the two leaders in the “not too distant future.”Mr. Trump provided no details, and China has said nothing publicly about any such meeting. The stakes of a visit would be high: President Trump has imposed 20 percent tariffs on China’s shipments to the United States, and may order another round next month. China wants to try to head off further escalations in the trade war that would set back its efforts to revive the country’s beleaguered economy, experts say.But before any summit can take place, China still needs answers to two pressing questions: What does Mr. Trump want? Who can Beijing talk to in Washington who Mr. Trump might listen to?To try to answer these questions, China sent scholars to the United States to take part in unofficial diplomatic talks last month with Trump administration officials and American foreign policy experts. China has grown concerned that the officials Beijing have been dealing with at the State Department and the National Security Council, who are outside Mr. Trump’s inner circle, are not conveying their messages to him, some of the scholars said.“We talk through the diplomatic channel. That’s the normal channel. But can that reach President Trump? Do those people we talked to really know what President Trump is thinking?” said Da Wei, the director of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, who was among the scholars.China has also been publicly signaling its interest in talks. The Chinese commerce minister said earlier this month that he wrote a letter to the U.S. commerce secretary and U.S. trade representative inviting them to meet. And Chinese officials describing Beijing’s efforts to curtail the production of fentanyl last week urged the United States to return to dialogue.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Turns Up Trade Pressure on China After Beijing Fails to Come Running

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    China is still cautiously trying to figure out what Trump wants. The president has threatened big tariffs in response to the inaction.When President Trump threatened tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China in January, saying those countries needed to do more to stop the flow of drugs and migrants into the United States, Canadian and Mexican officials raced to Washington, bearing charts and videos detailing their efforts to toughen their borders.Canada created a “fentanyl czar” and committed fresh resources to combating organized crime, while Mexico dispatched troops to the border and delivered cartel operatives into U.S. custody. As a result, Mr. Trump paused tariffs on America’s North American neighbors for 30 days.China never made these kinds of overtures and, in Mr. Trump’s view, did not take any big moves to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States. So on Feb. 4, Mr. Trump moved forward with imposing a 10 percent tariff on all Chinese imports. Last week, the president said that on March 4 he would add another 10 percent on top of all existing Chinese tariffs.Mr. Trump is moving quickly to radically transform the U.S.-China trade relationship. The Chinese are moving much more cautiously and deliberately as they try to assess Mr. Trump and determine what it is he actually wants from China. Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have held calls with their Chinese counterparts. But a call between Mr. Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has failed to materialize.The Chinese do not want to initiate a conversation because they do not want to be seen as pleading, and are wary of offering concessions before they understand the parameters of the debate, people familiar with the discussions said. Instead, Chinese officials, academics and others close to the government have been holding discreet conversations to try to determine Mr. Trump’s motives, while floating various aspects of a potential trade deal between the countries to assess the Americans’ reaction.“With my experience with the Chinese, they are suspicious in the initial rounds of a negotiation that there are hidden traps or other reasons to be cautious,” said Michael Pillsbury, a China expert who advises the Trump administration on dealing with the country.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump’s New Crackdown on China Is Just Beginning

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    The administration is positioning itself to clamp down on Chinese investment and access to technology. But the wild card may be the president himself.President Trump’s tough talk on China typically centers on tariffs. But a closer look at the decisions he has made since taking office shows that the president is considering a far wider set of economic restrictions on Beijing, ones that could hasten America’s split from a critical trading partner.The Trump administration has so far proposed expanding restrictions on investments flowing between the United States and China. It has appointed officials who, because of national security concerns, are likely to push for more curbs on Chinese investments and technology sales to China. And Mr. Trump has ushered in a 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports, a move that he called an “opening salvo.”After years in which officials from both parties gradually pared back America’s economic relationship with China, Mr. Trump’s moves suggest that he is prepared to sever ties more aggressively.Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, said the investment memorandum that the administration issued on Friday read like “a call to finish the unfinished task of fully unwinding commercial ties with China.”“So far, pragmatists have prevailed in getting a more narrow version of decoupling,” Ms. Sacks said.The pronouncements could be “a bargaining tool” for Mr. Trump to kick off negotiations with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, Ms. Sacks said. “But should that fall apart or not work out — which is probably most likely — I see this as the blueprint to finish the job of decoupling.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Eyes a Bigger, Better Trade Deal With China

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    During the Biden administration, Donald J. Trump would sit in his mirrored and gold-trimmed salon at Mar-a-Lago where he had once hosted China’s leader, Xi Jinping, brooding to visitors about the outcome of the trade agreement he signed with China in 2020.Mr. Trump would castigate “stupid people” in the White House for failing to honor “my trade agreement,” and muse about how, if he won a second term, he could strike the deal of a century with Mr. Xi.Now back in the Oval Office, President Trump is eyeing the possibility of a new trade deal with China.More than half a dozen current and former advisers and others familiar with Mr. Trump’s thinking say that, although there would be significant hurdles to reaching any agreement, the president would like to strike a wide-ranging deal with Mr. Xi, one that goes beyond just reworking the trading relationship.Mr. Trump has expressed interest in a deal that would include substantial investments and commitments from the Chinese to buy more American products (despite China’s failure to buy an additional $200 billion of goods and services under the 2020 agreement). He would like an agreement to also include issues like nuclear weapons security, which he envisions ironing out man to man with Mr. Xi, his advisers say.Mr. Trump is already following a familiar playbook of tariffs and other threats as he looks to negotiate a deal. On Feb. 1, he hit Beijing with 10 percent tariffs on all Chinese imports — what the president called an “opening salvo” — quickly resulting in retaliation from the Chinese. He has also floated the idea of revoking the permanent normal trading relations the United States extended to China more than 20 years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    China Strikes Back After Trump Imposes 10% Tariff on Goods

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    After a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products took effect on Tuesday, China announced retaliatory measures, including tariffs and an investigation of Google.Beijing responded swiftly on Tuesday to the tariffs President Trump had promised, announcing a fusillade of countermeasures targeting American companies and imports of critical products.Mr. Trump’s 10 percent tariff on all Chinese products went into effect at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, the result of an executive order issued over the weekend aimed at pressuring Beijing to crack down on fentanyl shipments into the United States.The Chinese government came back with a series of retaliatory steps, including additional tariffs on liquefied natural gas, coal, farm machinery and other products from the United States. It also said it had implemented restrictions on the export of certain critical minerals, many of which are used in the production of high-tech products.In addition, Chinese market regulators said they had launched an antimonopoly investigation into Google. Google is blocked from China’s internet, but the move may disrupt the company’s dealings with Chinese companies.The U.S. tariffs, which Mr. Trump said on Monday were an “opening salvo,” come on top of levies that the president imposed during his first term. Many Chinese products already faced a 10 or 25 percent tariff, and the move adds a 10 percent tariff to more than $400 billion of goods that Americans purchase from China each year.Mr. Trump had been planning to hit America’s three largest trading partners, Canada, Mexico and China, with tariffs of varying degrees. But after days of frantic negotiations, Mr. Trump agreed to pause the tariffs on Mexico and Canada for 30 days after the Canadian and Mexican governments promised to step up their oversight of fentanyl and the border.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Is Trump More Flexible on China Than His Hawkish Cabinet Picks Suggest?

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    President-elect Donald J. Trump is assembling a team of aides bent on confrontation with China. But he also has advisers who do business there, including Elon Musk.They are the new class of cold warriors, guns pointed at China.President-elect Donald J. Trump has chosen cabinet secretaries and a national security adviser who stress the need to confront China across the entire security and economic spectrum: military posture, trade, technology, espionage, human rights and Taiwan.Those choices could open a new era of conflict with a nuclear-armed nation that has the world’s largest standing army and second-largest economy, and where many top officials see the United States as a superpower in decline.Mr. Trump’s hawkish advisers so far include Marco Rubio, a Florida senator named as secretary of state; Michael Waltz, a Florida congressman tapped for national security adviser; and Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News television personality designated to be defense secretary. Cabinet secretaries must be confirmed by the Senate, although Mr. Trump has floated the idea of getting around that by using recess appointments.Those men are more explicitly hostile to China than their counterparts in the Biden administration, though President Biden has taken an aggressive tack with China and continued some of the policies from Mr. Trump’s first term. A consensus has solidified among Democrats and Republicans in Washington that China must be constrained because it is the nation most capable of upending American global dominance.Yet there are signs that Mr. Trump might consider a more moderate approach on trade, perhaps to avoid upsetting a roaring stock market nurtured by Mr. Biden.Mr. Trump with President Xi Jinping of China in Beijing in November 2017. Mr. Trump hosted Mr. Xi at Mar-a-Lago earlier that year, but their budding relationship eventually fell apart over a trade war that Mr. Trump started.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Blinken’s Visit to China: What to Know

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    Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is in China this week as tensions have risen over trade, security, Russia’s war on Ukraine and the Middle East crisis.Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is meeting officials in China this week as disputes over wars, trade, technology and security are testing the two countries’ efforts to stabilize the relationship.The United States is heading into an election year in which President Biden will face intense pressure to confront China’s authoritarian government and offer new protections for American businesses and workers from low-priced Chinese imports.China is courting foreign investment to help its sluggish economy. At the same time, its leader, Xi Jinping, has been bolstering national security and expanding China’s military footprint around Taiwan and the South China Sea in ways that have alarmed its neighbors.Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi have held talks to prevent their countries’ disputes from spiraling into conflict, after relations sank to their lowest point in decades last year. But an array of challenges could make steadying the relationship difficult.Showdowns Over China’s Territory ClaimsThe United States has been pushing back against China’s increasingly assertive claims over swaths of the South China Sea and the self-governed island of Taiwan by building security alliances in Asia.That effort has prompted more concerns in Beijing that the United States is leading a campaign to encircle China and contain its rise.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More