Since then-US President Richard Nixon’s meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong in February 1972, US-China relations have gone through distinctly different phases.

During the US/USSR Cold War, Nixon wanted to bring China onto America’s side. During President George W Bush’s tenure, China was welcomed into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001, with expectations that it would then become more amenable to US interests. Ever since, China has become much stronger, more self-reliant and globally increasingly influential in terms of trade, technologies, governance and geopolitics.

Moreover, China has succeeded in quickly moving up the global value chain and gaining in regional influence. Across the aisle on Capitol Hill, this has been perceived as “eating America’s lunch”, precipitating an about-turn in the US’ attitude toward China.

Following President Barack Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”, President Joe Biden deployed a three-pronged strategy to confront the rise of China: strengthening alliances and partnerships, investing in home industries and infrastructure; and limiting sensitive technology exports to China, as outlined in a Feb 3 Brookings article.

With President Donald Trump, smoke and mirrors have clouded Sino-US relations.

During Trump’s first term in April 2017, President Xi Jinping visited his Mar-a-Lago resort, focusing on relationship building; this was followed by Trump’s state visit to Beijing in November, generally touted as “a new historic starting point” “with trade as a ballast”.

That ballast has been thrown overboard by Trump’s latest global tariff war and a host of anti-China sanctions and technological restrictions, not to mention “America First” unilateralism in international relations.

Trump’s imposed global tariff hikes on trade in goods ignore America’s massive global surpluses in terms of trade in services (such as royalties and license fees). His tariff hikes are “trumped up” numbers which bear little rational economic logic. Witness those imposed on some islands near Antarctica which are only inhabited by penguins.

Nevertheless, many other nations, including US allies, have bent over backward to accommodate Trump’s coercive demands. But China, despite a bloody nose, remains unbowed and resilient, following Xi’s prescient call (when Trump gained the White House), for self-reliance in technology, a pivot to the Global South, and economic rebalancing with “dual circulation” between consumption and exports.

China appears to have now found its feet in this all-out “war without smoke” with the global hegemon, fortified by a newfound rare-earth stranglehold over America’s Achilles heel.

Contrary to expectations, despite Trump’s massive tariffs, China’s exports have actually risen. This is not so surprising as China’s exports to the US have declined to 10 to 11 percent of its total global exports, buttressed by a rising share from Global South trading partners.

The US, on the contrary, continues to lose ground in its self-defeating global tariff war, hurting US traditional allies. Moreover, with midterm elections coming up, exports of key commodities like soybeans, red meat, and corn from states in the Republican Party’s political heartland have suffered a massive decline.

According to analysis by Oxford Economics, China’s export reconfiguration has been driven by three strategies — diversification from developed to emerging markets; a pivot to intermediate and capital goods; and moving up the value chain.

On technological self-reliance, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China is leading in 37 of 44 cutting-edge technologies. According to George Town University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Chinese universities are producing more than 77,000 STEM PhDs per year compared to approximately 40,000 in the US.

Any doubts about China’s technological resilience have disappeared with China’s success in bringing back soil samples from the far side of the moon as well as building from scratch and successfully operating its own Tiangong space station. China has from the very start been excluded from the US-led International Space Station, which accepted other nations, including Russia.

Trump wants to “Make America Great Again” by harvesting tariff revenue globally to redress persistent massive fiscal deficits, forcing manufacturing, shipping, and jobs back to the US, expanding America’s critical mineral resources (think Greenland, Canada, Ukraine, and recent mineral deals with a host of Asian countries), and thwarting or confronting China’s rising influence in the Asia-Pacific and elsewhere.

All these ambitions Trump hopes to achieve by weaponizing America’s dominance as the world’s largest economy, its ubiquitous dollar, and its financial prowess, by way of a global tariff war.

Separately, by rallying America’s allies, albeit hurt and estranged by his indiscriminate tariffs, the US continues to besiege China on all fronts, not least in the South China Sea. Think Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia.

Trump’s climbdown on tariff hikes, shipping charges, and sensitive export curbs on Chinese subsidiaries has drawn ire from top Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Nevertheless, a 2025 Chicago Council Survey found that American politicians’ policies of disengaging from and limiting China are no longer in step with the latest shift of US public opinion, according to a China Daily report of Nov 13.

On a Fox News TV interview on Nov 10, Trump opined that US allies have “exploited America more in trade than China has”.

But America’s obsession with besting China is a different story. Long-lost manufacturing jobs and shipping infrastructure are unlikely to return to the US anytime soon because of tariffs.

For self-defense, China used the V-Day military parade in September to showcase its latest state-of-the-art, game-changing arsenal, including vehicle-mounted hypersonic intercontinental missiles with separately-navigable nuclear warheads capable of reaching anywhere in the US.

China hopes to create a more equitable, inclusive, multilateral world order less beholden to “winner-takes-all” rules. Above all, it focuses on the nation’s “Two Centenary Goals” of national rejuvenation. The first centenary goal was reached in 2021, including doubling 2010 per capita disposable income to over $4,500.

The year 2035 will be a midway milestone to realizing the second centenary goal, including doubling China’s 2020 per capita income, achieving the status of a “medium developed country”. This requires a reachable annual growth rate of 4.17 percent.

Meanwhile, with its 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) coming up, China is keeping its eye on the ball, leapfrogging toward the technologies and innovation that will redefine the world in the remainder of the 21st century.

Trump’s oft-repeated wish for another state visit to Beijing and his hope for Xi’s return visit to the US in 2026 coincide with the timing of America’s upcoming midterm elections. Whether such visits, if materialized, will result in a new rapprochement, if not a grand bargain, remains to be seen, in light of the deep-seated structural divide in national priorities.

The author is an international independent China strategist, and was previously the director-general of social welfare and Hong Kong’s official chief representative for the UK, Eastern Europe, Russia, Norway, and Switzerland.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.