Washington - A highly combustible cocktail of Donald Trump’s volatility and Xi Jinping’s increasingly aggressive and autocratic rule threatens to plunge already precarious US-China relations into a dangerous new era, some of the world’s leading China specialists say in a new report. For the last 18 months a taskforce of prominent China experts, some of whom have dealt with Beijing for more than 50 years, has been formulating a series of recommendations on how the incoming White House should conduct relations with the world’s second largest economy. The group’s report, which was handed to the White House on Sunday, says ties between the two nuclear-armed countries could rapidly deteriorate into an economic or even military confrontation if compromise on issues including trade, Taiwan and the South China Sea cannot be found. Winston Lord, a former US ambassador to China and one of the report’s authors, told the Guardian: “I’m not totally despondent. I think we can get through this. But I think right now because of China’s policies and the uncertainties of Trump we are in the most uncertain situation certainly since the Tiananmen Square massacre.” Orville Schell, a veteran China scholar who was one of taskforce’s chairs, said he was fearful about Trump’s apparent inclination to light a bonfire under decades of US policy towards China. “We have a weird situation – and actually an incredibly dangerous one – because Trump is so unpredictable,” he said. “This is America’s Cultural Revolution. Just as Mao overthrew the party establishment and unleashed his red guards, Trump is going after the foreign policy establishment elite and he is unleashing his populism.” Even before his shock election last November, Trump had indicated he would take a far harder line towards what he called “the bad China”. “There are people who wish I wouldn’t refer to China as our enemy. But that’s exactly what they are,” Trump wrote in his bestselling campaign manifesto, Great Again: How To Fix Our Crippled America. To China’s dismay, Trump – who has yet to speak with Xi Jinping since his inauguration – has done little to tone down such rhetoric since his election victory. On television and Twitter he has accused Beijing of militarising the South China Sea, manipulating its currency and hampering attempts to rein in North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un. Trump has also angered Beijing by hinting he could offer greater political recognition to Taiwan, a democratically ruled island that China claims as part of its own territory. The taskforce’s 74-page report describes threats to overturn the US’s decades-old “One China” policy towards Taiwan – under which it does not dispute Beijing’s claim to the island – as “exceedingly dangerous” and possibly the most imminent danger to US-China relations and regional stability. “In China’s universe if you don’t agree on ‘One China’ it’s like being in an evangelical church and having someone scream out: ‘There is no God!’ It’s blasphemy,” said Schell.(FA)
