Trump’s Chinese Cookbook
Over the last decade, rumours of the US President’s close political ties to Russia have been a mix of wild speculation and grim reality. On one hand, it is undeniable that Donald Trump has been cozying up to Putin. His disgraceful behaviour towards Zelenskyy at The White House, contrasted starkly with his blasé approach to Russia’s war aims, turning a rather blind eye to Putin’s brutal invasion of the Ukraine.
On the other hand, an unholy alliance of conspiracy theorists, mainstream media commentators and political pundits has long imagined that Trump is an unwitting agent of Putin and they have stretched credulity to prove his traitorous Russian sympathies. For example, in the run up to his first presidency in 2017, ex-Observer correspondent, Carole Cadwalladr (not exactly known for her journalistic standards) wrote of “collusion between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime.” Soon after, the Guardian newspaper wrote that Trump was “cultivated as a Russian asset” for over 40 years.
Suspicion and conspiracy seem to be the go-to positions by both left and right these days, presumably because no-one can believe that world leaders are so rudderless; so they are looking for “logical” reasons to explain the state of the world. It cannot possibly that western social order is breaking down due to its lack of dynamism, they say, so it must be a cabal of rogues at the WTO doing it on purpose, maybe.
As the future becomes less predictable, so we bemoan the passing of the comforting certainties of the past. More than ever before, Western leaders have needed a well-established Russian enemy to maintain some semblance of order by comparison. But even those orthodoxies are under threat. Andrew Ryvkin, writing in the Atlantic claims that Trump’s pro-Russian moves have “robbed the Kremlin of its north star: opposition to the United States.” Ironically, those Cold War narratives provided a stabilizing legitimacy for ailing Western economies too. At the fall of the Berlin Wall, why else would Margaret Thatcher famously assure Gorbachev that the West “wanted to do nothing that would be seen by the Russians as a threat to their security.” However bad it gets in the West, the argument went, we’ll look good compared to those authoritarian and inefficient Ruskies.
Trump’s current affinity to Russia, however, seems to be purely tactical and possibly fleeting. He shows no long-term interests in allying with Putin, other than as a mere cynical show of strength. By turning post-Cold War conventions on their head, he can buy some time to revel in Russia’s confusion, and by definition, look strong by comparison… aided by his self-confident, self-deception about America’s dynamism. Trump is attempting to change the rules of the game; to challenge the old enmities, to move on from its old allies and attempt to reshape international relations. In so doing, Trump is leaving behind Western ways of doing things and beginning to read from the Chinese authoritarian playbook of social and political expediency. Whether absorbing lessons from Imperial China or from the current Chinese Communist Party, Trump is open to ideas.
As a transactional politician, Trump’s domestic objectives seem predominantly to promote American exceptionalism and to rebuild business self-sufficiency. China can surely provide a masterclass in that kind of closed society survivalism. It can also give him clear directions on building mercantilist authority over local and international events. Ditto, Trump can learn a thing or two from Xi when it comes to commanding respect (and to reprimand anyone sleighting his character), to amassing personal wealth, to doing whatever is necessary to advance his interests, to get reparations, to lead international allegiances, to build acolytes abroad, and to promote the stability of the nation’s borders. If that means undermining the legitimate political demands for independence and sovereignty of other nations, Xi will be supportive.
In contemporary news stories, simply replace “Trump/America” with “Xi Jinping/China” and replace “Ukraine” with, say “Taiwan”, and we have a simple guide to Trump’s curve towards the Orient.
Until fairly recently, China has never really been a substantial part of the polarised political narrative in the West. Whether that was because of the more immediate fear of Soviet communism; or whether it was the geographical gulf between the West and China; its so-called inscrutability and its assumed global irrelevance. China has always been a country of which we know little; that we are now having to learn a lot about. Of course, we know about its human rights abuses but, as Foreign Policy magazine says, “President Donald Trump is notoriously indifferent to human rights”, preferring instead, to strike deals.
China is a fundamentally pragmatic nation, giving Trump clues about how to morph his policies without any regard to what went before. Loyal mandarins like Elon Musk are expendable, admittedly not castrated but suitably neutered and exiled. Both Xi and Trump’s politics are now governed by “what works” regardless of how or why. It is a philosophy that privileges results over ideology. This might seem counter-intuitive, i.e. to suggest that China is ideology-lite, but its pragmatism is actually one of the reasons for its successful transition from state socialism to market capitalism (admittedly with Chinese characteristics) while strengthening the leadership of the Great Helmsman across all of these different social transitions.
Pragmatism is the only philosophy to have originated in America. One of its staunchest proponents, John Dewey visited China in the 1920s (as the country was going through a period of radical post-imperial turmoil) and returned to extol the virtues of Chinese civilization to his American audience. Fast forward 100 years and Trump is clearly “the epitome of pragmatism”. Nowadays, even though Trump has an ambiguous stance on China, Deng Xiaoping’s fabled maxim: “it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice” is not a far cry from Trump’s maxim: “I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win.” Ex-president Hu Jintao’s “harmonious society” that proposed guaranteeing stability though a one-party state, and Trump’s maxim of “peace through strength”, are two sides of the same coin.
Unlike China, America is clearly still notionally a democracy, but the US is clearly hankering after some of China’s can-do mentality, it’s blasé refusal to engage with opposing opinion, the stability of its national founding myths, its facial recognition roll-out, its social credit monitoring, its passive population, its strict party structure, its loyal state bureaucracy, and of course, its GDP growth.
It seems as if Trump is learning from the longevity of China’s closed society, as his own dynasty now prides itself on protectionism and America First.
Back when China operated an Imperial tribute system, supplicants would bring gifts and kow-tow to their superiors in return for trade. Such practices are captured in the Qing-era painting “Ten Thousand Nations Coming to Pay Tribute.” In Trump’s version – henceforth known the tariff ritual – more than 50 countries have queued up to initiate trade talks and, as he says, to “kiss my ass”. Reminiscent of Xi Jinping’s avowed intent to end the century of humiliation for China and have it emerge as the greatest power on earth, Trump claims to be formulating the conditions for the end of an “era of economic surrender” and to Make America Great Again.
Trump’s cabinet appointees demonstrate his desire to manage by decree, meanwhile he is churning out Executive Orders with little democratic oversight. Xi would be pleased. Then there is his clamping down on protest, closing down criticism, defunding university courses, limiting legal redress, and threatening sovereign nations. The list goes on, even to the suggestion that he, like President Xi might run for an unconstitutional third term.
All of the above are quintessential acts of Chinese authoritarian leadership; but they are shocking when replicated by a democratically-elected one. China gets away with it because it’s a pragmatic one-party state. As far as Trump is concerned, that seems to sound more and more appealing.
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