Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: U.S. President Donald Trump’s shift in approach to U.S. allies amuses and unsettles Beijing, China flexes its muscles with new restrictions on rare-earth mining and processing, and Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui’s sentencing for a fraud conviction is delayed.
Does Trump Have a China Strategy?
U.S. President Donald Trump’s abandonment of long-term allies in Europe and embrace of Russia is causing amusement and concern in Beijing. Chinese leaders welcome U.S. hostility toward Ukraine—where China has supported Russia’s invasion—but they also worry that the United States is looking to move assets away from Europe to the Indo-Pacific.
There are advocates of such a grand strategy in the Trump administration, including Eldridge Colby, who is nominated for undersecretary of defense for policy but faces a confirmation battle in the Senate. But other actions seem to belie this approach, such as eliminating cybersecurity programs; the assault on the FBI, which directs counterintelligence efforts against China; and prioritizing culture wars at the Defense Department instead of material strategy.
The Trump administration’s anti-China strategy would also depend on allies like Japan and South Korea—but the president seems to see no value in alliances. Trump has also targeted Taiwan, which was previously a key part of the U.S. strategy of restricting China from accessing advanced chips, while defunding efforts to build semiconductor capabilities in the United States.
In a highly publicized call between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 24, Xi called the two countries “true friends who have been through thick and thin together.” That should pour cold water on the idea that befriending Russia could split the de facto alliance between Beijing and Moscow, allowing the United States to pull off a geopolitical coup.
Splitting up China and Russia is a perennial U.S. fantasy—one that even Henry Kissinger promoted shortly before his death. As longtime Russia correspondent Christian Caryl argued in FP last week, that was always an unlikely proposition. The Sino-Soviet split took place years before U.S. President Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking 1972 visit to China; in contrast, Xi and Putin are close partners.
The Chinese readout of the call emphasized that the China-Russia relationship “is not an act of expediency, not affected by any temporary incidents, and not subject to interference by external factors.” And pragmatically, China is a plausible partner: a giant neighbor with long-term interests that have been strongly aligned with Russia’s since the early 2000s. (Compare that to a faraway United States attempting a sudden pivot in global affairs.)
Trump has repeatedly targeted China with tariffs, but he has also expressed hope that the two countries can strike a trade deal. He might actually find it easier to bargain with China because the dismantling of U.S. state capacity by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has resulted in a near-total halt of programs that counter Chinese influence worldwide. But Beijing would likely demand more of Washington for a stable, long-term arrangement.
For such a deal, China would want the United States to actively suppress speech that is critical of Beijing and to break up diaspora organizations that oppose the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as it has demanded from other countries such as Turkey and Kazakhstan. The Trump administration might be willing to do that—but the U.S. Constitution could get in the way.
China’s best strategy might be to lean into its own anti-progressive animus, seeking to strike a cultural alliance with the U.S. government over shared misogyny and homophobia—as Putin has successfully done. Parts of the U.S. right wing have already embraced Chinese nationalists’ hatred of baizuo, or progressives—the local equivalent of being “anti-woke.”
Fundamentally, the Trump administration doesn’t seem to have a China strategy. Instead, as is often the case, factions and individuals—from China hawks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio to figures with business stakes like Musk and FBI director Kash Patel—are competing for influence with a president who has little interest in anything that doesn’t directly affect him.
What We’re Following
Rare-earth restrictions. China is flexing its muscles on supply chains, looking to demonstrate to the United States that it can take measures that would severely harm the U.S. economy. Beijing’s latest step is banning nonstate firms from rare-earth mining and refining, giving the government a monopoly on control of the critical minerals.
China produces roughly 70 percent of the global rare-earth supply, largely because it dominates the processing of minerals, which are often mined in other countries. Efforts to rebuild the industry in the United States have been proposed for years but have had little success, since the cost advantages of the current Chinese system are substantial.
Guo Wengui’s sentencing. Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, who fled the country in 2014 after being on the losing side of a political battle, played an important role in U.S.-China politics during Trump’s first term. Guo was a close ally of Trump advisor Steve Bannon and enthusiastically funded pro-Trump media.
Guo proved a controversial figure within the Chinese exile community, but Beijing saw him as a serious threat and attempted to lobby Trump for his deportation. Now, the billionaire may be set to make a return into the Trumpian sphere. He was convicted of fraud last year in a case that prosecutors linked to Bannon and was due to be sentenced in January.
For no clear reason, however, only Guo’s chief of staff was sentenced. Guo has been lobbying for a pardon from Trump, and his sentencing remains indefinitely delayed.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- It’s Time for Europe to Do the Unthinkable by Kishore Mahbubani
- The New Meaning of ‘Munich’ by Michael Hirsh
- Samuel Huntington Is Getting His Revenge by Nils Gilman
Tech and Business
Private business protection. Xi’s meeting with top Chinese CEOs last week resulted in a spate of moves from regulators and legal authorities looking to boost the role of private enterprise and restart a sluggish economy.
Prosecutors have stated that they will protect businesspeople from illegal investigations and economic crime. Private small and medium enterprises in China are vulnerable to extortion by officials at multiple levels. (For example, China’s fire services are notorious for extorting money and other bribes from bars and restaurants while disregarding safety.)
Any step that genuinely shields businesses could be a major help—but like other anti-corruption efforts in China, it is likely to trail off as old norms reassert themselves.
Too many eggs. As egg prices soar in the United States, they are plunging in China, where the world’s largest poultry market is suffering from overproduction and prices have hit record lows.
Each country’s problem might seem like the other’s solution, but eggs are usually produced locally. The United States currently only imports eggs from one country, Turkey, though egg smugglers have been caught at the southern U.S. border. Like most of the world, China uses different systems to control salmonella risk than the United States.
The H5N1 strain of bird flu is driving U.S. prices up as the disease threatens to become endemic among livestock in the United States. H5N1 has been endemic in Chinese poultry since the late 2000s, but containment measures are strong, including routine vaccination of birds since 2017—something that many countries avoid due to trade restrictions.