GORDON CHANG: Is Trump rescuing China's Communists?

"If I didn’t bash that woody with China, I deliberation China would person breached apart," President Donald Trump told Fox News' Bret Baier earlier this month.

Trump was talking astir the arrangement, announced May 12, successful which the United States and China agreed, among different things, to trim their wide tariff rates connected the different by 115 percent points for 90 days.

Most analysts person scored the pact arsenic a triumph for China. The simplification successful American tariffs allows China to resume income to the U.S.—America accounts for much than a 3rd of planetary user spending—but the simplification successful Chinese tariffs does small to licence American goods to participate China. The main obstacles to American exports to China are China’s non-tariff barriers, and the announced intermission does thing to extremity non-tariff barriers enactment successful spot earlier April 2, "Liberation Day," arsenic Trump called it.

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Moreover, the simplification successful U.S. tariffs is akin to unilateral disarmament. U.S. tariffs are mostly remedies for China’s theft of U.S. intelligence spot and its progressively predatory commercialized practices. During the pause, China is continuing these unacceptable practices without facing the punishment of America’s elevated tariffs. 

"China came retired connected top," Alan Tonelson, an American commercialized adept who blogs astatine RealityChek told me. "No question, we got the abbreviated extremity of the stick."

Trump’s "tariff war," arsenic the Chinese authorities calls it, could not person travel astatine a worse clip for the Communist Party. 

The country’s system was already successful distress. Yes, the National Bureau of Statistics continually issues reports of robust maturation of gross home product—5.4% successful the archetypal quarter—but successful reality, the system looks similar it is contracting. Price information for February, March, and April corroborate China is successful a deflationary spiral.

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Trump’s "Liberation Day" tariffs battered China’s already struggling export sector. Factories were closing, unpaid workers were demonstrating successful the streets, smaller banks were restricting withdrawals. As Trump suggested to Baier, the Chinese authorities was struggling and mightiness not person survived his precocious tariffs.

The 90-day pause, therefore, gave the Chinese authorities a lifeline. Now, China’s factories can marque and vessel products to America for the astir important clip of the twelvemonth for them: the Christmas season, which starts astir June.

The Communist Party is nary alien to rescues from America. Three times American presidents person saved communism successful China. 

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Richard Nixon did that successful 1972, adjacent the extremity of Mao Zedong’s decade-long Cultural Revolution, fundamentally a civilian warfare that astir brought down the regime. His sojourn to Beijing signaled to the Chinese radical that America stood with communist rule. 

George H. W. Bush threw Deng Xiaoping a lifeline aft the nation-wide demonstrations and slaughter successful Beijing’s Tiananmen Square successful 1989. 

Finally, determination was Bill Clinton’s commercialized woody successful 1999, which came astatine a debased constituent for a Chinese authorities past struggling to look from the Asian Financial Crisis. The woody paved the mode for China’s fabulously beneficial—and wholly premature—entry into the World Trade Organization.

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Washington had a large request to enlist Mao successful the Cold War conflict against the Soviet Union, but Bush and Clinton would person been overmuch amended disconnected without the Chinese Communist state. 

Bush and Clinton, starring a ascendant America, thought that Chinese leaders would reciprocate and enactment cooperatively with Washington and its partners. The Communist Party, astir everyone past assumed, would spot it successful its involvement successful maintaining an planetary strategy that was liable for China’s rise.

"By now, it’s wide that our hopeful assumptions astir China’s trajectory were fundamentally wrong," Charles Burton of the Sinopsis deliberation vessel told maine this week. "As China grew stronger, the Communist Party became adjacent much hostile, belligerent, and dangerous." 

This month, Xi Jinping demonstrated that practice with his hostile, belligerent, and unsafe authorities is not possible. First, China violated its committedness to region each "the non-tariff countermeasures taken against the United States since April 2, 2025." Among those countermeasures is the April 4 prohibition of export of magnets and definite minerals to the U.S., which is inactive successful place.

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Then, the Communist Party, done the semi-official Global Times tabloid, signaled it would not by the extremity of 90 days region what Trump connected May 12 called "all of its non-monetary barriers."

Finally, connected May 18, the Chinese cardinal authorities upped the stakes, provocatively imposing a 74.9% anti-dumping duty connected U.S.-made POM copolymers, an concern plastic.

China’s effect to Trump’s concessions was "blatantly dishonest," Charles Burton, besides a erstwhile Canadian diplomat successful Beijing, said. "Bad religion bargaining is the Communist Party’s stock-in-trade," helium added.

"Trump’s comments to Bret Baier amusement that the president fto up connected China astatine precisely the incorrect time," Tonelson pointed out. 

Trump had leverage and gave it up. China past went connected the attack.

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So, what should President Donald Trump bash now?

"The archetypal happening is to locomotion distant from China’s mendacious interactions," Burton advises. "Rescuing communists ne'er works."  

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