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GORDON CHANG: Is Trump rescuing China's Communists?
By Gordon Chang
Published May 27, 2025
"If I didn’t do that deal with China, I think China would have broken apart," President Donald Trump told Fox News' Bret Baier earlier this month.
Trump was talking about the arrangement, announced May 12, in which the United States and China agreed, among other things, to reduce their general tariff rates on the other by 115 percentage points for 90 days.
Most analysts have scored the pact as a win for China. The reduction in American tariffs allows China to resume sales to the U.S.—America accounts for more than a third of global consumer spending—but the reduction in Chinese tariffs does little to permit American goods to enter China. The main obstacles to American exports to China are China’s non-tariff barriers, and the announced pause does nothing to end non-tariff barriers put in place before April 2, "Liberation Day," as Trump called it.
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Moreover, the reduction in U.S. tariffs is akin to unilateral disarmament. U.S. tariffs are generally remedies for China’s theft of U.S. intellectual property and its increasingly predatory trade practices. During the pause, China is continuing these unacceptable practices without facing the penalty of America’s elevated tariffs.
"China came out on top," Alan Tonelson, an American trade expert who blogs at RealityChek told me. "No question, we got the short end of the stick."
Trump’s "tariff war," as the Chinese regime calls it, could not have come at a worse time for the Communist Party.
The country’s economy was already in distress. Yes, the National Bureau of Statistics continually issues reports of robust growth of gross domestic product—5.4% in the first quarter—but in reality, the economy looks like it is contracting. Price data for February, March, and April confirm China is in a deflationary spiral.
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Trump’s "Liberation Day" tariffs battered China’s already struggling export sector. Factories were closing, unpaid workers were demonstrating in the streets, smaller banks were restricting withdrawals. As Trump suggested to Baier, the Chinese regime was struggling and might not have survived his high tariffs.
The 90-day pause, therefore, gave the Chinese regime a lifeline. Now, China’s factories can make and ship products to America for the most important time of the year for them: the Christmas season, which starts around June.
The Communist Party is no stranger to rescues from America. Three times American presidents have saved communism in China.
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Richard Nixon did that in 1972, near the end of Mao Zedong’s decade-long Cultural Revolution, essentially a civil war that almost brought down the regime. His visit to Beijing signaled to the Chinese people that America stood with communist rule.
George H. W. Bush threw Deng Xiaoping a lifeline after the nation-wide demonstrations and slaughter in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Finally, there was Bill Clinton’s trade deal in 1999, which came at a low point for a Chinese state then struggling to emerge from the Asian Financial Crisis. The deal paved the way for China’s fabulously beneficial—and wholly premature—entry into the World Trade Organization.
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Washington had a great need to enlist Mao in the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union, but Bush and Clinton would have been much better off without the Chinese Communist state.
Bush and Clinton, leading a dominant America, thought that Chinese leaders would reciprocate and work cooperatively with Washington and its partners. The Communist Party, almost everyone then assumed, would see it in its interest in maintaining an international system that was responsible for China’s rise.
"By now, it’s clear that our hopeful assumptions about China’s trajectory were fundamentally wrong," Charles Burton of the Sinopsis think tank told me this week. "As China grew stronger, the Communist Party became even more hostile, belligerent, and dangerous."
This month, Xi Jinping demonstrated that cooperation with his hostile, belligerent, and dangerous regime is not possible. First, China violated its promise to remove all "the non-tariff countermeasures taken against the United States since April 2, 2025." Among those countermeasures is the April 4 prohibition of export of magnets and certain minerals to the U.S., which is still in place.
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Then, the Communist Party, through the semi-official Global Times tabloid, signaled it would not by the end of 90 days remove what Trump on May 12 called "all of its non-monetary barriers."
Finally, on May 18, the Chinese central government upped the stakes, provocatively imposing a 74.9% anti-dumping duty on U.S.-made POM copolymers, an industrial plastic.
China’s response to Trump’s concessions was "blatantly dishonest," Charles Burton, also a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing, said. "Bad faith bargaining is the Communist Party’s stock-in-trade," he added.
"Trump’s comments to Bret Baier show that the president let up on China at exactly the wrong time," Tonelson pointed out.
Trump had leverage and gave it up. China then went on the attack.
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So, what should President Donald Trump do now?
"The first thing is to walk away from China’s mendacious interactions," Burton advises. "Rescuing communists never works."
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