When it comes to China, Trump is stuck in the 1980s, thanks to his Cold War-era advisors
WRITTEN BY Zheping Huang
December 19, 2016
US president-elect Donald J. Trump said that he doesn’t want to be “bound by a ‘one China’ policy,” the US’s decades-long stance of treating Taiwan and China as the same country. Instead, he plans to use the issue as a bargaining chip, he said Dec. 11, to “make a deal” with China on trade and other issues.
The concept is as out of date as Trump’s completely erroneous stance on Beijing’s currency, which he demonstrated on the campaign trail and after the election, Chinese analysts and scholars say. (Trump has insisted again and again that China is artificially weakening its currency to increase trade, a situation that hasn’t actually been true since the 1990s.)
By trying to use the island as a bargaining chip, Trump is harking back to the White House’s approach to the US-China relations throughout the 80s and the 90s—an approach that changed drastically under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as world’s biggest economies became more intertwined.
Trump’s throwback approach comes because he has surrounded himself with outdated, Cold War-era advisors who have had little exposure to China since then, analysts including Shen Yi, an associate professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Shanghai’s Fudan University, say. Trump is playing a “classic Taiwan card” once played by Republican presidents including Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Shen said.
http://qz.com/861409/when-it-comes-to-china-donald-trump-is-stuck-in-the-1980s-thanks-to-the-cold-war-era-advisors-surrounding-him/