In May 2018, suddenly, the Chinese telephone company ZTE put all its staff on technical unemployment. In question, the sanctions taken by the Americans against this Chinese flagship accused of having violated the American embargoes on Iran and North Korea. Deprived of American electronic components, the firm was on the ground.
This episode was decisive in the trade war that Donald Trump launched against China. Clearly, it appeared that the Chinese were still vulnerable to US sanctions, because they were still technologically behind the US. So the battle for world leadership was not quite over, and the Americans had the means to win it.
Donald Trump’s mandate will have been that of confrontation with China, and there is a broad consensus in Washington. Barack Obama had chosen the progressive method, by surrounding China with the trans-Pacific free trade agreement which included the powers of the region except Beijing and a non-aggression agreement in industrial espionage sealed in 2015. Donald Trump chooses the brutal method, believing that China, which entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, did not respect fair trade rules, looted American technologies and was regressing authoritarianism. If anyone other than Donald Trump had been in the White House, everyone would have applauded, starting with the Europeans.
Democratic candidate Joe Biden, accused of having been naive about Beijing in the past and described as “made in China” by his opponent because his policies would have led to massive relocations when he was Barack Obama’s vice-president, is pretty much on the same line as Donald Trump, although he prefers to go through the route of hard bargaining. He will invoke the climate or human rights, although it should be noted that the Trump administration has been firmer than the Europeans on Hong Kong and the Uighurs.
Sino-American decoupling
During his tenure, Donald Trump imposed massive tariffs on almost all Chinese imports, and signed a provisional armistice in which the Chinese pledge to buy American products, including American products. This agreement, which does not deal with essential subjects like the forced transfer of technology and Chinese subsidies to their companies, is only half respected.
But the main thing is elsewhere: the Trump era marks the beginning of Sino-American decoupling, the de-nesting of their economies after four decades of globalization. The most edifying example is the probable “Americanization” of the Chinese-born social network TikTok. The Americans, who put Chinese investments at home under surveillance, de facto dissuade Chinese students from coming to study in American universities and discovered with the Covid-19 crisis that it was essential to know how to manufacture drugs and products on their soil. strategic.
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