[“Xi Jinping is more measured in his public statements than Donald Trump, but the Chinese government will likely hit back quite forcefully against any radical efforts to challenge the status quo,” Ms. Weiss said. “The best thing the president-elect’s advisers can do for our national security is to screen Trump’s tweets.”]
By Chris Buckley
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|
President Xi Jinping
singing the Chinese national anthem at the Great Hall
of the People in Beijing.
Unlike President-elect Donald J. Trump,
Mr. Xi rarely speaks off
the cuff in public.
Credit Damir
Sagolj/Reuters
|
BEIJING
— Both came to power vowing
to restore their nations to greatness. But America’s loud, ad-libbing
president-elect, Donald J. Trump, and China’s guarded, calculating president,
Xi Jinping, are glaring contrasts as politicians, and their pairing has
injected new unpredictability into relations between their governments.
“I could not think of two more different
protagonists in the great drama of U.S.-China relations,” Evan S. Medeiros,
formerly the senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security
Council, said by email. “Personalities matter a lot in international relations,
especially between great powers.”
A quarrel after China seized an underwater
drone from the United States Navy has given a taste of how Mr. Trump’s and Mr.
Xi’s different styles could play out if bigger tensions were to break out over
the South China Sea, trade imbalances, North Korea’s nuclear weapons or other
issues that Mr. Trump has raised.
Mr. Trump has recently blared warnings at
China, seemingly guided by visceral reflexes and a vague but bold set of
demands. By contrast, Mr. Xi, the son of a Communist veteran, is disciplined
and steely. He rarely speaks off the cuff in public. Even his seemingly
impromptu gestures are often carefully choreographed, and he usually adheres to
policy points when meeting foreign leaders. Mr. Xi is certainly capable of bold
action, as he has shown in the South China Sea, but he tends to shroud his
thinking in a cloud of slogans. That leaves outsiders guessing about when and
how he will act on his demands.
“The situation could become quite
combustible,” said Jessica Chen Weiss, an associate professor at Cornell
University who studies Chinese foreign policy.
“Xi Jinping is more measured in his public
statements than Donald Trump, but the Chinese government will likely hit back
quite forcefully against any radical efforts to challenge the status quo,” Ms.
Weiss said. “The best thing the president-elect’s advisers can do for our
national security is to screen Trump’s tweets.”
Mr. Trump took to Twitter on Saturday after
the Chinese military confirmed that it had seized a submersible drone in waters
about 50 miles northwest of Subic Bay in the Philippines. The Pentagon had
revealed the seizure, and China’s Ministry of National Defense said it would
return the device, which can be used to monitor undersea currents and conditions,
in an “appropriate manner.”
Mr. Trump suggested that wasn’t good enough.
He said China’s seizure was an unprecedented act, and later added, “We should
tell China that we don’t want the drone they stole back.”
Mr. Trump did not say how he would handle
similar disputes after he is sworn. But his other comments so far suggest that
he will take a blunter, less predictable course on China than recent White
House administrations.
This month, Mr. Trump spoke on the phone with
Tsai Ing-wen, the president of Taiwan, breaking nearly 40 years of American
presidents and presidents-elect avoiding direct conversation with the leader of
the island, over which China claims sovereignty.
In an interview with Fox News, Mr. Trump then
suggested he could depart from the One China principle, which blocks Washington
from diplomatic ties with Taiwan, using that as a pressure point to seek trade
concessions from Beijing. He also criticized China on trade, the buildup of
military outposts in the South China Sea and its reluctance to isolate North
Korea.
“China is not used to the U.S. asserting and
pushing its interests like the Chinese do,” said Dan Blumenthal, the director
of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, who praised Mr. Trump’s
blunter approach. “If it is prepared for that, we will be able to avoid
confrontation and conflict.”
So far, Mr. Xi has not reacted publicly to
Mr. Trump’s warnings. The two men had a brief but cordial call after Mr. Trump
won the election. Chinese leaders rarely wade openly into disputes, leaving
that to junior officials. But pressure for a tougher reaction to Mr. Trump
could build in China if he keeps lobbing out warnings, especially after he
becomes president.
Experts disagreed over whether China’s
seizure of the submersible drone was intended as a signal to Mr. Trump, or even
authorized by Mr. Xi. But Chinese decision makers probably took into account
that Mr. Trump’s team would read it as “a test and a warning,” said Ni Lexiong,
a naval affairs researcher at the Shanghai University of Political Science and
Law.
“It would be impossible for China not to
react to his provocations,” Mr. Ni said by telephone. “Trump seems to want a
foreign policy that keeps the other side guessing. But that way of working can
easily lead to trouble.”
On Monday, an editorial in a prominent
Communist Party newspaper said that Mr. Xi’s government needed to be ready for
rockier relations.
“Trump hits out with a hammer to the east and
a club to the west, and his real thinking is very difficult to fathom,” said
the editorial in the overseas edition of the paper, People’s Daily, using a
Chinese saying that means to speak or act without rhyme or reason. China, it
said, should “stay steady on its feet, keep a good grasp of developments,
calmly respond, and that’s it.”
But even China’s calls for calm have barbs
and caveats that could rile a Trump administration.
When the Chinese defense ministry said it
would return the submersible drone, it also said the Chinese ship showed a
“professional and responsible attitude” by seizing the device, although the
drone appeared to be outside even an extremely expansive view of China’s
rightful reach in the South China Sea.
Chinese hard-liners are already urging a
harsher response to Mr. Trump. On Saturday, Global Times, a newspaper often
dominated by anti-American rhetoric, held a forum in Beijing where speakers
urged tough retaliation if Mr. Trump moved closer to Taiwan, and praised the
seizure of the underwater drone.
“China isn’t afraid of confrontation with
America,” Dai Xu, a former Chinese Air Force senior colonel and outspoken hawk,
said at the meeting. “Without China’s cooperation, Trump will achieve nothing.
I dare say that if he opts for confrontation with China, he won’t stay in
office for more than four years.”
Another speaker, Jin Canrong, a professor of
international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, told Global Times:
“China is a dragon. America is an eagle. Britain is a lion. When the dragon
wakes up, the others are all snacks.”
Such tough talk does not set Chinese foreign
policy, but Mr. Xi and other leaders are sensitive to nationalist ire that they
themselves have nurtured. Mr. Xi has summed up his vision of national
rejuvenation and strength as the “Chinese Dream,’’ a theme he has promoted
since taking office.
Pressures on Mr. Xi are likely to grow if Mr.
Trump continues publicly excoriating China, especially on territorial issues,
like Taiwan and the South China Sea, where public sentiment often favors a
tough response.
“China tends to give the new leader a grace
period to settle in,” Ms. Weiss said, citing her research about China’s
response to elections and new leaders. “Trump has moved more quickly to
challenge and defy China than other president-elects, however, so the grace
period could end quickly.”
American presidents know how swiftly
relations with China can deteriorate.
In 1999, President Bill Clinton struggled to
repair ties after NATO bombs struck the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, then the
capital of Yugoslavia, killing three people. The White House insisted the
bombing was accidental, but the Chinese government did not believe that, and
days of angry protests followed.
In 2001, a United States Navy reconnaissance
plane made an emergency landing on Hainan, a Chinese island-province jutting
into the South China Sea, after colliding with a Chinese Air Force jet whose
pilot plunged to his death. Eleven days later, China released the 24 American
crew members, and the plane was recovered in parts over the following months.
A scenario like that could unfold very
differently under Mr. Trump.
“If Trump perceives that he is being
challenged, he will probably instinctively not want to be seen as weak,” said
Bonnie S. Glaser, the director of the China Power Project at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It will be very messy if he
decides to tweet or speak publicly in a crisis before he has all the
intelligence and analysis necessary.”
Mr. Xi also has his domestic political
timetable to worry about. He was appointed head of the Communist Party in 2012,
and next year a party congress is all but certain to give him five more years
in that job. But Mr. Xi must settle on a new cohort of senior officials to work
under him, and during elite shake-ups the party leadership puts even more
emphasis on stability.
“The leadership has to balance those goals of
preserving a more stable and predictable external environment with avoiding the
perception of weakness and vulnerability,” Ms. Glaser said. “I tend to believe
that the latter will trump the former if the Chinese leadership has to choose.
Pun intended.”
