Donald Trump’s arrival in power and a new Sino-American trade war?

The result of a long history, relations between the world’s leading American power and the People’s Republic of China have undergone major changes since the rapprochement of the late 1970s to today’s significant deterioration¹.

Positioning itself as the world’s factory by ensuring industrial production in sectors as vast as automobiles, ready-to-wear clothing and electronics, China has, over several decades, accumulated a considerable trade surplus with the United States but also with the majority of its trading partners in the world.

This lasting advantageous position has allowed it to consolidate its place in the global economic ecosystem and to form political alliances on a global scale.

With its entry into the World Trade Organization, China has seen its growth accelerate further as well as its penetration of international markets and global value chains².

By acquiring considerable market shares in several countries in the Global North and South, China has been able to secure supplies of raw materials essential to its economy while maintaining potential outlets for its considerable manufacturing production.

It is in this context and after nearly 3 decades of uninterrupted growth that the new Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the New Silk Roads initiative, thus crowning the affirmation of Chinese power at the global level both economically and politically³.

Previously, the arrival in power of President Barack Obama had represented a major change in the international policy of the United States towards China, marked in particular by the great shift to the East of the world’s leading power⁴.

However, it is under the mandate of President Donald Trump that the systemic rivalry with the Chinese giant will crystallize, materializing in the implementation of customs tariffs, a tool of a merciless trade war⁵.

Joe Biden’s rise to power has not changed this situation since the world’s two largest economies have continued to confront each other remotely on all fronts⁶.

The COVID-19 pandemic has also exacerbated geopolitical tensions and highlighted the difficult choice between protectionism and openness to the world in the United States, China and other countries.

In this context, Donald Trump’s return to power represents a major challenge for the global economy, particularly in the perspective of a massive increase in customs tariffs on products from China, European countries and the rest of the world⁷.

But is the situation really that simple?

Despite the profound changes that have taken place in the weight of emerging countries in the global economy, it may seem a little hasty to suggest that China would like a direct confrontation with the United States of America to challenge its global hegemony now.

Although it has significantly caught up with the United States and even surpassed it in certain key technological sectors, China still has a GDP per capita that is much lower than that of the American giant and is only just beginning to compete militarily with American power⁸.

In addition, the Chinese approach aims, in parallel with increased participation in the current global economic system, to offer an alternative for countries wishing to challenge the world order⁹.

This dual positioning raises the question of whether a situation of competition with the United States without direct confrontation is sustainable for China or whether, in view of recent events and the multiplication of conflicts, whether in Ukraine or in the Middle East, China wishes to accelerate the confrontation with the United States.

The reading grids highlighting American power as solely the bearer of anti-state liberalism in the face of a Chinese state bearing authoritarian capitalism seem greatly limited in analyzing the current systemic rivalry between the two leading world powers¹⁰¹¹¹².

Indeed, it is not only, as in the Cold War, an ideological confrontation between two world views and a total affiliation of states to one camp or another¹³.

It is rather a struggle over the control of strategic telecommunications infrastructures intervening at several levels of the economy and going beyond simple state structures¹⁴.

By relying on national technological behemoths¹⁵, the two states that are the United States and China are advancing their geopolitical pawns at the global level by increasing their economic and political zones of influence, thus forcing the states at the heart of this struggle to pledge allegiance to one of the two giants or to both simultaneously.

Moreover, it is this aspect of this new Cold War that differentiates it from the previous one because the countries at the heart of this battle for influence can in certain cases not take a position and maintain economic and political relations with the two great powers echoing a form of new non-aligned movement.

But this in-between situation may seem fragile in view of global geopolitical instability.

In addition to China and the United States, other economic, political and military actors occupy a leading place, thus participating in the multiplication of conflicts in the world.

It is this uncertainty about the creation of a bipolarized world between two camps, of which China and the United States would be the standard-bearers, which raises questions about the possibility of a transformation of this new Cold War into an old Cold War.

The more the systemic rivalry between China and the United States increases, the more the necessary explicit allegiances of other countries to one of the two giants become pressing, thus giving rise to a clear confrontation between two camps.