Superpower Showdown

April 15, 2020
A revealing look at U.S.-China trade relations during the Trump administration. In December 2018, an informal poll of 75 corporate executives attending a Washington, D.C., conference showed that roughly 50% believed that, in light of recent trade history, the U.S. and China would be at war within 30 years. Davis, a Pulitzer-winning senior editor at the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau, and Wei, who works at the Journal's Beijing bureau, depict this "romance gone bad" by focusing on the first three years of the Trump administration. According to the authors, a series of miscalculations and misunderstandings on both sides have brought the two nations to the current impasse. Chinese President Xi Jinping has failed to appreciate how his government's subsidization of private companies and implausible denials of technological theft have alienated American officials. As for Donald Trump, the authors persuasively argue that his protectionist policies vis-�-vis China have achieved mixed results at best. Yet Trump "deserves credit for challenging the easy assumptions about China that had guided American policy since at least the Clinton administration," particularly the idea that economic engagement would lead to political liberalization. General readers may be forgiven for skimming the more detailed passages, which depict the seemingly endless series of trade talks and controversies. Yet the authors skillfully enliven what could have been a dull narrative. Particularly diverting are the biographical sketches of the participants in the trade talks--including that of Peter Navarro, the profane hard-line economist in Trump's administration--and a number of illuminating anecdotes and facts. China, for example, had the world's largest economy "until roughly the U.S. Civil War," and the Chinese refer to those who return home after working overseas as "hai gui," or "sea turtles." "We hope this book provides the material to understand what happened and why," the authors conclude. Mission accomplished.

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Starred review from May 18, 2020
Wall Street Journal reporters Davis and Wei deliver an essential look at recent U.S.-Chinese relations, up through the January 2020 trade deal. Going back to the beginnings of China’s economic rise in the 1980s, they trace the deterioration in the country’s relationship with the U.S., which Beijing officials once likened to an “old married couple who needed each other, even though they might bicker.” Davis and Wei remind readers that Bill Clinton, “now seen as the great globalizer,” initially ran as an advocate for reviving U.S. manufacturing and as a harsh critic of China’s human-rights record, only to forge close economic ties to the country once in office. The potentially dry subject matter is made vivid by the authors’ references to relevant aspects of their family backgrounds—Wei's as the granddaughter of a veteran of Mao’s Long March, and Davis’s as the son of a factory owner who encountered intractable competition from Asian manufacturing—and by portraits of such key players as Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro. They end by listing options for the next U.S. president, whether Trump or Joe Biden, to take on China, including more multilateral use of tariffs abroad, and greater use of tariffs at home. This is required reading for anyone concerned about America’s economic future.