Trump’s much ballyhooed China trade deal gives way less than meets the eye.
Trump, who said he’d do only “great” trade deals and would designate China a currency manipulator, announced $250 billion of trade deals with China as proof that he has successfully wrestled mano-a-mano with Premier Xi and bringing home lots of goodies for long-suffering American workers.
A more accurate point of view might be that Xi appears not to have gone out of his way to put Trump down, as Trump had done during Xi’s Mar-a-Lago visit, by arriving after Xi had landed and other diplomatic snubs. Worse, while Xi was under US surveillance, the US launched air strikes on a Syrian airbase. I thought if I were Xi, I’d be furious at my inability to talk freely to my aides and military advisers, and most important, diplomats who handle Russia and Syria, while such a potentially destabilizing event was in play.
Instead, Xi engaged in the classic Chinese strategy of overwhelming leaders with ceremony and pampering. Quartz explained that this show is effective:
But Chinese president Xi Jinping added a creamy layer of pomp and circumstance to the mix when the White House delegation reached Beijing. Trump has been feted with everything from an unprecedented private dinner in the Forbidden City to a red carpet welcome in Tiananmen Square, the Beijing landmark where hundreds of students were killed by the Chinese military in 1989…China’s government is “playing Trump like a fiddle,” said Jorge Guajardo, Mexico’s ambassador to China from 2007 to 2013. “You don’t have good chemistry with a Chinese leader who doesn’t speak your language and is geared to not develop chemistry,” he said.The Communist Party’s top aides are masterful at making diplomats and foreign businessmen feel special…
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/11/trumps-250-billion-china-trade-deals-usual-hype-greatly-exceeds-reality.html
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