US’s channels with China have gone dark with Trump’s return
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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. For the past year and a half, senior Treasury officials have met with their Chinese counterparts almost once every other month. Whether an incoming Trump team will keep such channels of dialogue going is now up in the air.
President Biden and President-elect Donald Trump both advocate a tough stance on China, but have substantially different strategies on how to interact with Beijing. Before Trump took office in early 2017, the two governments had over 90 official channels of communication. He and his team had little patience for such formalized communication, seeing them as a way for China’s leaders to suck the U.S.
into endless discussions that yielded little meaningful change in policies seen as harmful to American workers and businesses. By the end of Trump’s first term, such channels had dwindled to virtually zero. The Biden administration, in an effort to reset relations strained by the countries’ geopolitical rivalry and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, has re-established dialogue with Xi Jinping’s government in recent years, with some two dozen high-level channels covering topics from economic and financial matters to security and climate change.
Jay Shambaugh, Treasury’s undersecretary for international affairs who has held seven rounds of economic talks with Beijing, said such dialogues have enabled Washington to press Beijing on issues of deep concern to the U.S., such as China’s industrial overcapacity, even as the administration this year has raised tariffs on Chinese steel, electric vehicles and other products that have flooded world markets. “Just because we’re talking doesn’t mean we don’t continue to take defensive actions," Shambaugh said in an interview. A
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