Trump's Tariff Strategy Risks Long-Term Damage to US-China Relationship
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From KQED in San Francisco, this is Forum. I'm Mina Kim. President Trump signaled again this weekend his desire to make a trade deal with China while insisting they're, quote, ripping us. Meantime, China says the U.S. must cancel its tariffs before any meaningful talks and stop bullying countries into trade negotiations. So what are the prospects for relations between the two global powers? And what's at stake for both countries if they don't reach a trade deal soon?

We turn this hour to Harvard-US-Asia relations expert Rana Mitter to take your questions after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. President Trump last Friday ended the tariff exemption on items from China worth less than $800. That means clothes, toys, or household goods from sites like Timu or Shein just got a whole lot more expensive, as buyers now need to pay an import tax up to 145% of the order's value.

It's the latest development in the U.S.-China trade war to unleash impacts on companies and consumers. It also threatens to ratchet up tensions between the two countries, even as the U.S. says a deal could come this week. We take a closer look at where the trade war is headed and its broader impact on relations with China with Rana Mitter, S.D. Lee Chair in U.S.-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. Professor Mitter, welcome to Forum.

Mina, it's great to be with you today. Great to have you. Just staying with this de minimis exception here, in addition to making cheap Chinese-made items more expensive, it sounds like ending the exception on orders under $800 will mean a whole lot of other things, like shipping delays, too?

Yes, essentially a very large part of what's been allowed under this de minimis exception. This is basically, as you've said, that very small parcels of very small value can essentially be imported into the United States without needing to go through the full customs clearance process.

A lot of what's affected there is not just Chinese goods, but Chinese goods that are sold in small numbers, or rather small amounts, but high quantities. In other words, these companies like Shein, Timu, that provide fast fashion, kind of fun items, a lot of things that are there, more for entertainment than necessarily core goods.

People will likely cut back on those because, of course, when they become too expensive, people won't buy them anymore. And that's likely to mean that the number of them that are shipped also reduces drastically. So it has an effect in terms of logistics and overall shipping bookings also. Yeah, and even those that will be shipped will have to be checked and everything by customs. So that could make it

a lot longer for people to receive them. The other thing that I've been hearing is that major social media companies, for example, are already seeing ad revenue impacts because Timu and Sheehan are unlikely to blanket those sites like they used to with their ads. Well,

Well, I think that's right. I mean, if you think about something like, say, you know, a set of hair clips or maybe some kind of small piece of decoration for, you know, your teenage bedroom, something like that. Those are things that if they cost a few dollars, you see them advertised on social media, you click, you go through. It's all part of a global consumer supply chain.

But when it becomes too expensive to actually supply those items, everything, including the advertising and what's paid for by the advertising, tends to go down as well. So there's a huge ratchet effect that we'd like to see as a result of this one legal change. But worth it, do you think, Professor Mitter, to help U.S. businesses compete, worth it to get rid of this exception on orders under $800 being exempt from the import tax?

Well, I have to say there's one particular area if we're discussing the benefits, Mina, that one has to bring about, which is that there's been a lot of environmental concern about fast fashion and the kind of items that are shipped in through these sorts of de minimis rules.

In other words, these things are being manufactured often under not very favorable labor conditions. They use a lot of fossil fuels. They basically bring in things that add a certain amount of joy, but not necessarily huge amounts of absolute value. So you might say there's an environmental reason for saying that actually maybe the reducing and sale of these is a good idea. But the wider issue is still one about where does the economics go to? And it sounds like you're more skeptical about the economic benefits.

I have to say that I'm not sure that huge numbers of factories in the United States or indeed actually in the Western world, more broadly speaking, are going to produce these very small types of plastic goods. This isn't something that essentially only happened three or four years ago. If you think back, I mean, a few of your older listeners may remember back to the 1970s and 80s, Mina.

in those days made in hong kong made in taiwan made even in singapore and south korea meant these sort of small consumer type goods that were much cheaper to produce in those places the reason we don't produce there anymore globally is that essentially labor costs went up education levels went up and people wanted to move into higher level manufacturing in those sorts of areas i would say that if we're going to see these things produced in future they'd like you to move out of china and to places like

or even in future years, maybe the east coast of Africa, where there are beginning to be new supply chains emerging as part of China's Belt and Road. So yes, I think production in China will possibly reduce if these tariffs continue, but I don't think it's likely to move to the United States. It will move to other cheap producing countries, mainly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Interesting. Well, we've talked a lot about the impact of these tariffs on China,

California, on companies in the U.S. I am wondering if you could say more about the impacts it is having in China, because we are seeing reports of exports to the U.S. piling up on factory floors and so on. Yeah.

Yes, absolutely. It's clear that at least in the short term, the 145% tariffs that have been put on goods imported directly from China are having a real effect on employment. So places like Zhejiang province, which is on the eastern coastal area, eastern coastal part of China, we're seeing that goods such as furniture, toys, automobiles,

all those things that are basically produced using usually plastics and fast, just-in-time production, now no longer have a market to go to. The United States was not necessarily the only place that these places could ship to, but it's always been a very important market for consumer goods, certainly in the last 30 or 40 years. And right now the panic is to see if there are other markets that will take them. The problem is that places like the European Union, which also has, of course, a lot of high-income consumers who might buy these sorts of goods,

are putting up tariffs of their own. They're lower and they're more directed than the American tariffs, but they are worrying about overproduction in China that's basically going to mean that they might be faced with a glut of these sorts of products. So while those are

Alternative barriers go up. Factories in parts of China are beginning to pile up. Workers are being laid off. And actually, lots of people, middle managers in Chinese factories, are sounding a little bit like they're American equivalents. They're saying, we're producing, but it doesn't seem that we now have customers, the things that we're selling. And that's a real problem for us, which, of course, the Chinese government is very much aware of.

Yeah. Let me invite listeners to join the conversation. We're talking with Harvard professor and China expert Rana Mitter. So what questions do you have about the impact of the trade war on U.S. and China and on U.S.-China relations? And what questions do you have about China, its strategy, its long-term goals here?

You can email forum at kqed.org. Find us on our social channels, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or threads at KQED Forum. You can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. And if you have noticed impacts or the effects of the trade war with China, go ahead and share those with us as well.

So given what you just sort of laid out, I'm wondering who you think has the upper hand in trade negotiations right now. The president is talking about making a deal very soon. Who do you think is sort of winning?

I think that both sides at the moment have got themselves into a position where they're going to have to change their position if they don't want to lose. In the very short term, I think the United States does have the advantage. The reason being that I think that China was genuinely surprised by how far and how fast the Trump administration went on tariffs. You'll remember, Mina, that not that long ago, less than a year during the election campaign in fall of last year, there was talk in the Trump campaign about 60% tariffs.

And even that was thought to be pretty high and pretty outside the reach of anything anyone had thought of. But this time around, of course, 145 is more than twice as much. And I think it's fair to say that the Chinese government were not expecting the tariffs to be at

that level. They also, I think, didn't expect that China alone would be isolated with such high tariffs because their attempts to try and get other countries, you know, the EU or ASEAN in Southeast Asia, to join in a kind of united front with them against America, that hasn't really come off. So short-term advantage, definitely the United States.

But long term or medium term, China has some cards to play as well. First of all, there are no midterms in China because there are no elections in China. And I think that although there are a lot of workers, as we just discussed, who are being laid off, who are worried that they may not have jobs to go to in the near future,

Their capacity to protest is quite limited because of course China censors protest and will also arrest and crack down on people who might actually make their anger known publicly. But also the government is in a position to tell them, wait this out. We're in a position to outweigh the Americans. And when we've done that, we'll actually produce more employment by deploying our own resources at home, making our economy more self-sufficient. And eventually we won't need the Americans.

Now, although this might seem like a rather convenient argument from the Chinese point of view, they're also using a lot of propaganda tools. You can look on Chinese social media. See, there's a lot of anti-American sentiment being put out there on the social media channels. So right now, China has tactics to make sure that its population do stay in line with the idea that it's all America's fault.

But that said, my strong suspicion is that both sides, the United States and China, really want to wind down or pull down, sorry, really want to step down from the positions that they got themselves into and at least discreetly behind the scenes think about trying to get to a deal on both sides. Yeah.

So it sounds like you're saying at least politically, China has the upper hand in part because of the way that it manages its country. The other question I just wanted to ask you, because you mentioned that China was hoping that maybe Asia would be a united front against the U.S.'s tariffs. The U.S. has also tried to make preconditions with allies that they loosen ties with China for tariff relief. Have they been successful here?

They've certainly been making the case, but right now they haven't had a great deal of success in persuading allies that they need to actually cut China loose. Because, for instance, for most powers in Asia, China is now their major trading partner. That's really a situation that's changed over 25 years and it can't be changed overnight. Back in 2000, lots of countries in the Asia-Pacific region had the United States as their major trading partner.

But when it comes to issues such as trade agreements, trade frameworks, things like the RCEP, the Regional Common Economic, sorry, Cooperative Economic Partnership in the region, it's China which is in charge of these sorts of trade agreements because the U.S. hasn't been signing up to so many of them recently.

That means that when these countries like Indonesia or Malaysia or even Australia, which has pretty bad political relations with China, but thinks that it's important in terms of its trade, when they go to the United States and say, well, OK, you want us to cut China out of our supply chains, cut them out of our trade agreements,

What do you give us instead? The US doesn't have a big story to tell about how instead the US will open its markets or the US is going to put in new trade agreements in the region. Instead, it says that the US is actually going to put on tariffs and create walls. Now, right now, there are new trade agreements and discussions going on with countries like South Korea. I think that's been happening in DC literally within the last week. Vietnam is also in that category.

If those countries come out beaming, you know, their leaders beaming on their faces with pieces of paper saying, we got a great trade deal out of the United States and the rest of the region should follow, then the US may be on the front foot. But right now, we don't see South Korea, Vietnam showing the way yet as to being able to really take China out of those sorts of supply chains. And that's the challenge that they have. Yeah.

We're talking with Rana Mitter, Harvard professor, a U.S.-Asia relations expert, about the effect of the U.S.-China trade standoff on relations between the two countries, the effects it's having within those countries. What questions do you have about that? Stay with us for more after the break. I'm Mina Kim.

Support for Forum comes from San Francisco Opera. Experience the soaring highs and heartbreaking lows of bohemian life this summer in John Caird's beloved production of La Boheme. Puccini's most adored opera transports us into the heady bohemian world of 19th century Paris as we follow a circle of starving artists falling in and out of love, living for the moment. La Boheme runs June 3rd to 21st. Learn more at sfopera.com.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're looking this hour at what's at stake for the U.S. and China if they don't make a trade deal soon, and who has the upper hand in negotiations. Tariffs on many of China's imports into the U.S. now stand at 145%. Most U.S. imports into China face tariffs of 125%. You, our listeners, are joining the conversation with your questions and comments for Rana Mitter, SD Lee Chair in U.S.-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School.

What questions do you have about the impact of the trade war on the U.S., China, and our relations? What questions do you have about China's strategy and goals? And how have you noticed the effects of the trade war with China? 866-733-6786, the number to call, email address forum at kqed.org, and find us on our social media channels at KQED Forum. Let me go to caller Sadiq in Sunnyvale. Hi, Sadiq. You're on.

Hi there. I wanted to bring up how a lot of Americans still don't seem to realize that tariffs are not paid by the local buyer. Sorry, they're not paid by the foreign country. They're paid by the local buyer. And that seems to be still a point of huge misunderstanding. And

And also, it kind of goes against all of the stuff that the Republicans have been claiming, that child care, sorry, tariffs are going to bring in money for child care. They're going to bring in money for this and that. Right. But then is it the whole idea of tariffs to reduce demand on foreign goods and to eliminate that source of income? Isn't that like the long term goal? Then how can you still claim that it's going to be a huge source of income to pay for this and that?

And also say that we're going to eliminate that source of demand altogether. Right. Like, which is it? So do you think he sounds very doubtful, Rana? And I assume if people are not recognizing the potential costs on them now, they will very soon if a deal is not made.

I think that's probably right. Sadiq, thank you for your question. I mean, Sunnyvale, it's a beautiful place. And of course, right in the middle of Silicon Valley, where many of these issues about tariffs and supply chains could, you know, come to roost because, of course, big software companies, companies are dependent on components from China being shipped in as part of items like smartphones.

I think that we're going to see at the moment probably a lot of impact on shelf prices if you go to big companies. And for instance, Walmart, as I understand it, has something like 60% of its goods as direct imports from China. And it seems quite likely that even if a really big company that makes a lot of profit, like Walmart, could absorb some of the costs of those tariffs,

it's probable that they won't be able to absorb all of the costs. So I think in that situation, consumers are likely to see prices go up at least somewhat, maybe not by the whole of, say, the 145% tariff coming in on a Chinese good, but certainly some proportion of it.

So, I think right now there's a sort of political game of chicken going on in which the government is saying, the administration is saying, look, you need to actually sit with this for a while because you think that over time it's going to allow America to develop manufacturing that will come back to the US. And other people are saying, well, no, the problem is that it's going to cause inflation and that is something that the American consumer does not want at a moment when it basically believes that it's paying too much out of pocket already.

There's also a confusion because it's not clear at the moment which of two things the tariffs are supposed to do. One argument is very much the one that you've put forward, Sadiq Shah, not from your own viewpoint, I understand, but critiquing it.

that essentially the tariffs are there to stay. They're there to actually bring in income as a regular source of income, as used to happen in the late 19th century. And we don't really know how that works because really for the last 80 to 90 years, ever since World War II, the world has broadly moved towards more free trade agreements.

It's been actually very unusual to find countries putting barriers up like tariffs rather than taking them down. The last time we had really major global tariffs was way back in the 1930s, about 100 years ago, before the Second World War.

So that's one logic that is being tried out now for the first time in a century to essentially use tariffs as a means of protecting industry and trying to bring in income. The other logic, though, is that it's a negotiating tool. I mentioned in one of my earlier answers to Mina that

at the moment a lot of countries south korea vietnam have sent representatives to washington dc and they're looking to negotiate a lower version of the tariffs so essentially in that argument you'd be saying you only put up tariffs this very high level as long as you want to actually do a deal and when you've done that you bring them down again

With China, it's not clear which way that's going. Are the tariffs going to stay high to try and essentially box in China, box in Chinese business, make its imports to the US permanently too expensive to bring in? Or is it a negotiation tool? President Trump has talked about, and I quote here, my friend Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, that he wants him to pick up the phone and do a deal. If that's the case, then the tariffs on China might be much lower fairly soon. The signals that seem to be made in public are,

are that maybe the administration is looking to try and get to that sort of deal. But we simply don't know at the moment which of those two pathways is actually supposed to end up at. Yes, and you're underscoring too just how incredibly intertwined our economies are, which is why it makes it so complicated to be in a trade war with them. Well, that's absolutely right. I mean, to take one example, again, just thinking of Sadiq here because he's in Sunnyvale where, as we've said, a lot of the world's best-known tech comes from, including smartphones.

One particular company, perhaps one of the most famous American companies in the world, Apple, has announced probably within the last two or three weeks that it's going to ship all of the smartphones it makes, the iPhones that it makes for the US market, not from China, but from India.

So at first glance, that looks, well, that's a win for the idea that you move production out of China. And even if you're not bringing it back to the United States, you do it from India, which is a country that at least geopolitically appears to be more friendly, more favorable towards the U.S. So win-win scenario, right? Well, it's not quite that simple, because if you look at what's being proposed, it seems to be that the final assembly is

of those iPhones, those smartphones, is going to take place in factories in India for sure. But actually the components within them and the supply chain that brings the components that enables those workers in India finally to put them together actually is going to be still in China.

And one of the reasons for that is that Apple and various other companies from the West and also the Chinese authorities have spent the best part of decades creating one of the world's most efficient supply chains and workforces. Although labor costs in China have gone up over the years, it's still cheaper to produce those kind of goods in China. And Chinese workers at the moment have the training and skills to do them.

Now, that doesn't mean at all that you couldn't, over time, build factories in the United States, give the workers that training. That's what a lot of people who want to use the tariffs argue is necessary to do. But I know very few people who would argue it could be done quickly. It would probably mean that if you're talking about a period of, say, years, maybe even decades,

And before that, you're talking about a period when increased parts being made in the United States and being assembled in the U.S. would mean that higher labor costs would have to be built in. So the cost of a smartphone that might cost, say, $1,000 today might increase by two or three times to, say, $2,000, $3,500 today.

And it might be the case that American producers really like being able to produce these high tech goods. But American consumers, who are, of course, the same people in many ways, don't want to pay those kind of prices for everyday items. So that's where the difficulty lies. And as you say, Mina, it is very complex. What additional leverage does China have over the U.S.? A lot of people have brought up minerals, for example, critical minerals.

That's exactly right. There are various ways in which China can pressure the US more strongly than it's doing even just through the tariffs. And we should remember that China is putting 125% tariffs, 125, on US goods coming into China, but frankly, much more is exported the other way into the US than from the US into China. What we do export is things like agricultural goods.

So I think it's fair to say that over time, thinking about things like mineral resources as a pressure point on the U.S. is going to be very much on Chinese government minds.

And they have basically spent the last few years and decades making sure that places like Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, other places where there are essential minerals that need to be extracted. Again, for items like those smartphones, very rare elements, rare earths, things that cannot be easily extracted. You need special techniques to do it. China currently has not a monopoly, but a very strong hold.

overproduction of those sorts of rare earths. So again, for supply chains for American technology, China continues to be very important. Again, it doesn't mean that it couldn't change over time. And I think the US and other Western countries are spending a lot more time and resources trying to get

other sources of these sorts of rare earths available. But again, it's not the kind of thing that could be done overnight. And if there's going to be a move away from essentially having supply chains just in China, that's something that needs to start now. And it's not clear yet that the pace is really fast enough to be able to overcome that dependence on China in the short term.

We're looking at the impact of the US-China trade standoff and also on relations with China and why that relationship is so critical to the US. Rana Mittir is with us, a US-Asia relations professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. And so are you, our listeners, emailing us at forum at kqed.org, calling us at 866-733-6786 and posting on our social channels. Adele on Discord writes...

While I do not condone President Trump's means to his end, I do subscribe to the need for leveling the playing field for trade between nations. I'm in my mid-60s and long recall the problem of China stealing the U.S.'s intellectual property and using it to enrich their businesses. How has that problem evolved over the last several decades? Do you think this is protecting us from China stealing IP? And do you think they need our IP as badly as they used to, Rana?

Well, great points, Mina. Well, on the first one, I think it's absolutely fair to say, and I think most trade analysts would say, that China likes to play a bit of a bait and switch when it comes to aspects of international trade. And this essentially comes from the period about 25 years ago, when China entered the World Trade Organization, the WTO, with, it should be remembered, American sponsorship, both the Clinton and Bush administrations at that

time encouraged China to join and got them over the line to get in.

And during that time, China was given a sort of double play. It was allowed to regard itself as a fully modern economy that was part of the world trade system when it wanted to, but also given permission to regard itself as a developing country that needed to protect its own economy in various ways when it wanted to as well. And that had a really important effect in terms of enabling China to protect some of its own emerging industries.

So you talked about intellectual property and the theft of that. But remember, one of the things that China did most notably in that early 2000s period, Mina, was to ban the use in China of some of the best known Western social media and tech companies. So Google, Facebook, Twitter.

many of these Instagram, you know, WhatsApp, many of these apps, which of course are widely available, not just in the US, but around the world, have been and continue to be absolutely banned from normal users in China. I say normal users because there are ways to get around it with special software, but, you know, most ordinary people are not going to use those. And for that reason,

They were able to take some of the ideas that had come from Silicon Valley about social media and adapt them to the Chinese circumstances and become wildly profitable. So if you look at the equivalence in China, China doesn't have...

Facebook available, but it doesn't have Google, but it has Baidu, which of course is a market leader in China. It doesn't use TikTok, which is actually only for the Western market, even though it's a Chinese product, but they do have Douyin and other products that essentially enable people to produce those kinds of short videos. Kuaishou is another kind of really big app in China.

So China was able to keep out that kind of American tech and develop its own its own ecology in terms of social media and those sorts of products. That's led to a situation where, as your second question implied, Mina, it's not actually necessarily quite so central to their economic development to steal intellectual property, but rather to be in a position where they're developing their own because China's tech

uh, ecology is now one of the largest in the world, not quite as big as the United States, but compared to anywhere else, it's one of the most productive anywhere in the world. That's because over the last, let's say 10 to 15 years, they've been putting something like two and a half percent of annual GDP, uh, that's both private and public sector into education. They're building new research institutes, scientific institutes,

They're putting research money into places like electric vehicle batteries, which they see as the future. And then they're linking that state support of research and development to the kind of blue skies level to commercialization and tying it to their huge market. China, together with India, has the biggest single market in the world. And that means that when it comes to developing electric vehicles, which, of course, are one of the potential faces of the of transport in the next decade,

China is now becoming dominant because it has this huge market, which actually in many ways, it's developed through its own indigenous technology. When you look at a BYD car, much of the software within that, of course, it's based on ideas that have been taken from elsewhere, but actually it's been developed to a really high standard by China's own physicists,

math specialists and people who commercialize those elements in terms of commercial possibility. Also, one other element we should add, Mina, China's military is very, very innovative. It's looking for all sorts of new technology. And much of that military tech goes into the commercial sector and vice versa. That doesn't happen so easily in the Western world. But in China, the two sectors learn a lot from each other and it makes their technology even more innovative.

even more flexible in many ways. So that's some of the advantages that China has when it comes to tech and its commercialization. Yes, and of course, the headlines a couple of months ago were blaring about DeepSeek, right, and all of its developments in AI. Yes, indeed.

Yes, absolutely. Artificial intelligence is the cutting edge, of course, for every advanced society on Earth. And certainly the United States is absolutely at the heart of that, thinking about open AI and where that goes. But I think that a lot of the Western world, not just in the US, was handed what some people call a Sputnik moment just a few months ago, when DeepSeek, the

Chinese equivalent, you might say, almost of chat GPT was made commercially available. The Sputnik moment, I'm sure listeners remember, just to remind people back in the 1950s, I think 1957, was when America realized for the first time that the Soviet Union was

was ahead of the U.S. when it came to the space race, sending the first satellite, space satellite Sputnik, into space. And it spurred that Cold War space race competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, which culminated in some ways with the U.S. landing the first man on the moon in 1969. So many people regard the competition in AI

as being a sort of 2020s equivalent of that kind of Cold War space race, not this time between Russia and America, but between China and America. What DeepSeek has shown is that you can get highly effective, commercially viable artificial intelligence entity that

that is much, much cheaper to make than what turned out to be the very high development costs of Western equivalents such as a chat GPT. Now, I think it's fair to say that China might not have got there without actually looking at the kind of technological breakthroughs that were happening in California and Texas. But nonetheless, they've been able to take that tech and make it more than the sum of its parts. So that may be a sign of where things are going with China taking tech that exists elsewhere and really, you know, kind of turbocharging it in many ways.

And based on what you're describing, you know, if you could define U.S. policy on China, what would you recommend? And we're coming up on a break, so you can think about that for a moment while I remind listeners that we're talking with Rana Mitter, S.T. Lee Chair in U.S.-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. His recent article for Foreign Affairs is titled The Once and Future China, How Will Change Come to Beijing? He's also author of China's Good War.

How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism. And you can join our conversation at 866-733-6786. I see your questions here. Also at the email address forum at kqed.org and find us on Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, or threads at KQED Forum. So just start that answer and it's fine if we go into, if we need to take a break and then we can. But yes, I mean, given what you've just described, like what do you think is the right kind of policy on China that the U.S. should have? Oh,

Oh, well, I think there's one short, quick answer I can give you right now, meaning we can go into it after the break, which is start putting more money, public and private, into top level scientific research.

The US conquered in the Cold War because it managed to combine brilliant research in universities, in research institutions, and of course through the commercial sector. Right now there are signs that might be in danger. The US has a massive scientific advantage in global terms. Everyone turns to the US for global science. Make sure that doesn't fall apart.

What questions, listeners, do you have about China, its strategy, its long-term goals, and the impact of the trade war on U.S.-China relations? What approach do you think the U.S. should take with China? More after the break. I'm Mina Kim.

Support for Forum comes from San Francisco Opera. Experience the soaring highs and heartbreaking lows of bohemian life this summer in John Caird's beloved production of La Boheme. Puccini's most adored opera transports us into the heady bohemian world of 19th century Paris as we follow a circle of starving artists falling in and out of love, living for the moment. La Boheme runs June 3rd to 21st. Learn more at sfopera.com.

Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go. That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking this hour with Harvard professor and U.S.-Asia relations expert Rana Mitter about the present and future prospects for relations with China. And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation with your questions and comments. Ron wants to know how travel to China will be affected by Trump's tariffs and other policies. Professor Mitter.

That's a very interesting question. So we're thinking here perhaps about travel by Americans to China. Well, I think that that's something actually that has changed very fundamentally over the last few years. But actually, I would say that the big factor that's changed is not so much tariffs as COVID.

Up to the point of COVID, very large numbers of Americans were going regularly to China. There were business people, there were students. I mean, you know, thousands and thousands of American students would go and study in China and tourists as well. And then, of course, COVID came pretty much, you know, exactly five years ago in spring of 2020. And even though the COVID restrictions in China ended a couple of years ago when the virus essentially proved too hard to control and they ended up opening up to the virus and then

and then moving out of that situation. It is still the case that travel between the US and China has not really recovered. Many of the airline routes have not been restored. And there isn't so much enthusiasm for going in that, in either, sorry, in the direction of Americans going to China. I would say that Chinese students and business people are still coming to the United States, but even that number has gone down somewhat. So what will we need to see to make that situation change? Well,

Well, in terms of tourism, I think actually there are certain things that make China a bit more of a push in terms of selling it to American tourists in the present day. People perceive China as a place that maybe is not so friendly with the United States and that they don't necessarily want American tourists going there. So China's probably going to have to push a bit to actually change that sort of image.

It's also a little tougher to actually be in China these days because if you don't have a Chinese phone that has all the apps on it, it's actually quite hard to get around these days. You know, the old days of having some bank bills and being able to kind of wander around in taxis and so forth has become more difficult as China has become a place that demands that you have the right technology to be able to get around, along with quite a bit of surveillance.

But let's take just the one category I think is perhaps most important to keep going. That's American students. Only a few hundred, not even thousands, but a hundred American students are in China today studying Chinese language and finding out about the country. Now, regardless of your opinion of China, you may think that China and the US may have

a reasonably cooperative relationship on various things in the future, you may think actually they're going to be great adversaries. But it's really important for young Americans to know more about China, to learn the language, to learn more about the culture and society and actually go and see it for themselves.

because thousands and thousands of young Chinese are still coming to the United States and finding out plenty about the US. And having an imbalance in the future in which young Chinese know a lot about America, but young Americans really know very little about China, I think is a recipe for real trouble in terms of future diplomacy. So let's hope that we find ways to actually overcome that difficulty. So then what do you think is...

The most realistic, let's say positive scenario of relations between the two countries. It's sort of a continuation of my earlier question about what approach we should be taking. I mean, I assume the countries will never be terribly close. I assume China's never going to become a liberal democracy, for example. So what do you think if you could, you know, shape and hope that we would have sort of a realistic but positive scenario of relations? What could that look like?

Absolutely. And actually, you were kind enough to mention the article I have in the journal Foreign Affairs, which is called The Once and Future China, which is trying to look actually 20 years into the future about exactly what that more calm and cooperative relationship between the US and China might look like. I think you're right that probably the, you know, it's

it's unlikely to be an extremely friendly relationship. Although it's worth remembering that 30 or 40 years ago, when Jimmy Carter was president and Deng Xiaoping was in charge of China, actually the US and China did get on very closely, despite the fact that China was, of course, a communist state and not a democracy.

But I think there are going to be various areas where the two sides in future can learn to live with each other. First of all, I think it does demand that China becomes not a liberal democracy, but a more liberal autocracy, by which I mean the Communist Party is likely to stay in power for quite some time to come. But there's still the scope for

more free of media, for more civil society, for people to get together, you know, for instance, groups who want to, for instance, talk about environmental issues in China. That's one issue that's really, really big at a time when climate change is still affecting China a great deal. And right now, the government doesn't do a great deal to enable people to gather and make their views known on these subjects. So the Chinese Communist Party could work harder on allowing more open space for discussion within China itself.

If that was the case, then I think there would be more space also for reaching some sort of accommodation with the United States in a variety of areas. As I said, more student exchange, I think, would be a helpful thing in terms of both sides actually getting to talk to each other. And by the way, there's a particular reason why I think in the next few years, there might be just a small chance of that happening, Mina. That is that this generation of Chinese leaders, Xi Jinping, the current leader, and others are

are the very last who grew up during China's cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. That was a very inward-looking time. Listeners may know that it was a time that was almost like a civil war within China itself, full of violent action by China's youth and attempts to try and overthrow society.

But the generation that came after that, that grew up in the 1980s, and actually even in the early 1990s, after the horrors of Tiananmen Square in 1989, those two generations actually came to regard America not as an adversary, but potentially as a partner you could talk to. Let me give you one quick example of a world that wasn't that long ago, but that we have forgotten. In 1998, not that long ago overall,

President Bill Clinton visited Beijing and at Peking University, the most prestigious educational institution in the whole of China. He had a public debate on live Chinese TV in communist China with then President Jiang Zemin about whether democracy was a good idea or not.

Now, let's be clear. President Jiang Zemin and President Bill Clinton did not agree on the future of liberal democracy. Jiang Zemin thought it was not going to happen in China. Bill Clinton said that it should. But the point was that these two national leaders, the two immensely important countries, could meet together in Beijing and talk about this publicly in China.

If that could happen in China in 1998, I don't see any reason why it couldn't happen in China in the mid-2020s. And that China would be one that I think could have a more open and frank discussion with the United States and calm the temperature down on both sides. So I think that's what we've got to try and aim for. So, okay, let's try and aim for it. In the meantime, what effect do you think the trade war has had on the capacity of the U.S.,

to have good relations with China, to be able to sit down with the president and debate governmental systems. You know what I mean, though. But like, yeah, has it hurt it a lot? Absolutely. Well, I think what it has done in the short term, Mina, I'm afraid you're right, is that it has actually meant that China is probably going to be more separated than it is connected to the United States on a variety of important areas. We were talking about technology earlier. And I think it's fair to say that in the short term,

we're likely to see more restrictions on technology from the United States actually going into China. And that's likely to stimulate China to essentially produce more of its own technology and then try and use that, I think, to try and create influence in places like Southeast Asia and elsewhere, where things like Chinese 5G systems are more likely to be taken seriously.

by countries in that area. So that's going to be an area of difference rather than similarity between the US and China during that period in terms of the commercial and security implications of all of that.

If we had to pick one area where I think there's likely to be greater divergence in the next 5, 10, 15 years, I would choose the politics of energy. Because essentially the message that's coming from the current administration in the US is that there's still going to be a great deal of concentration on traditional fossil fuels, you might say oil, gas and so forth, many of which of course the US is producing and wants to export.

Now, China is also going to be very dependent on fossil fuels for a long time. But China is going to push hard the fact that it has a global dominance in green energy, particularly production of wind turbines and solar panels. And I think that that's going to be one of the areas where essentially

the trade war is likely to see the US and China try and push different sides, because each one of them is going to try and go to the rest of the countries in the world, the EU, ASEAN, the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and say, well, if you want to trade with us, you're going to have to do more with the energy solutions that we put forward. And I would imagine that China will try and basically push hard on the idea that it's green tech

is important in terms of combating climate change and should be tied up more and more with trade agreements that China signs. Meanwhile, the United States is going to tell its trading partners that you're going to have to buy more fuels from us if you want us to open the gates of America for your products and trade with you.

And I think most countries in the middle are going to try and balance those elements because many of them are in climate change vulnerable areas such as Southeast Asia. They're going to want to turn more to green tech as a means of trying to avoid many of the climate disasters they think may happen. But they also don't want to alienate the United States. They want to have those markets open to them to enable them to export into them.

And therefore, I think the US is going to have to be very careful about how it calibrates the tariffs in the end. It wants to make sure that its trading partners around the world remain partners and don't basically throw up their hands in despair, say it's too difficult to get our goods into the US and instead wholesale turn to China. That obviously would not be a good outcome for the United States. They have to work very hard and carefully to make sure that doesn't actually happen with trading partners.

We haven't talked about this yet, but I'm wondering if you think the trade tensions that the U.S. has with China and also with other countries are affecting in any way China's calculations on Taiwan. I'd also love to know if you have any sense of what the Trump administration's policy is toward Taiwan. But yeah, has it had any effect?

Well, in terms of the current administration's policy on Taiwan, so far, at least in public, we've seen no signs that there's going to be a stepping away from the very longstanding assurance that the United States has given that as long as Taiwan does a lot to look after its own defense, then the U.S. essentially considers Taiwan's continued status quo to be essentially a U.S. interest. And you see that from the statements

of many people involved with defense, national security, and so forth. I thought it was also indicative that Defense Secretary Hegseth visited both Tokyo and Manila in recent months and, in general, talked about the way in which the Asia-Pacific was going to be absolutely at the center of the Trump administration's wider security strategy. And Taiwan, of course, sits in the middle of that particular consideration.

But in terms of where the trade war might go in terms of relations with Taiwan, well, overall, I would say that Taiwan at the moment is very keen to hold on to what some people have called its silicon shield or its silicon defense. And that's the fact that as many listeners may know, Taiwan produces the highest specification semiconductor chips in the world.

And they don't get produced anywhere else. Basically, one company in particular, TSMC, which has been running for a few decades now, produces these very high level chips and they have to be exported from Taiwan if you want to put them into lots of very high tech applications. This means that if the Americans want them, then they have to get them from Taiwan. And if China wants them, they have to get them from Taiwan as well.

This has meant that the Taiwan government has taken great care to try and make sure that it protects those factories as much as possible. In fact, they're passing laws at the moment

to make sure that essentially no other actor, not the US, not China, can get the very highest level of semiconductor chips. They have to remain within Taiwan. So those sorts of actions are being taken by Taiwan, along with spending a lot on its own defense, to try and make sure that it keeps its current rather unique position as a non-recognized state that's still very important to the world economy.

But overall, I think it's very aware that it still has to keep the United States happy, that the U.S. in the end is the core factor that will lead to the either defense or defeat of Taiwan. And therefore, conversations with the United States are going to remain for a very long time a core part of the way in which Taiwan's national security establishment knows how safe it is in the region.

Meanwhile, China, I think, is unlikely to make any kind of military move against Taiwan in the short term. It knows that an amphibious attack would be very hard to bring off. So it's likely to use economic tactics and a certain amount of social media disinformation, perhaps, to try and influence the island. But a military attack, I think, at least in the short term, is actually not so likely.

Let me remind listeners you're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We've gotten a couple of questions along these lines. Paul writes,

In what ways were the 99 Seattle anti-globalization protests against the World Trade Organization ultimately prescient? I think there's just a lot of people who are really questioning whether, you know, this pursuit of free trade and so on was really worth it.

Well, it's a really important set of questions, Mina, because, of course, one of the things we have realized, and I think this is a global question, not just US, China, is that an awful lot of people whose ways of life and whose employment and whose security and status was based in manufacturing, producing, were left behind around the world. It's true in Europe. It's true in North America. It's true, actually, more and more in parts of Asia as well. Many people were thrown out of work in China when many factories there were privatized. So governments around the world

or dictatorships, finding ways to try and make sure that there is that kind of employment for their populations is going to be a core question of the 2020s. But it's not clear that reducing free trade overall is going to be the best way to do that. There has to be a judicious balance, I think, between making sure that there's free trade that means that consumers can buy at the right prices and also smart employment that makes sure that new jobs are created through new technology and that

workers get fulfilling and decent lives and work around the world. Well, there's a snarl discord rights. The U S is slowly learning that you can't duct tape testosterone to every trade problem. This isn't the 13th century where strength is measured in siege towers and swagger. It's the 21st where diplomacy is defense alliances are arsenals and humility is strategy. The strongest voice in the room is often the one that listens the longest. I imagine you'd agree with much of that professor. Yeah.

wise words particularly the store then that really nice phrase where we may have to use it somewhere about alliances being arsenals one of the things the united states has had really for you know the best part of three quarters of a century is some of the strongest and best alliances in the world both on security

and on trade. So, you know, obviously in the Northern European space, you have things like NATO. There isn't an exact NATO equivalent in Asia, but you have agreements with Japan, partners like South Korea, Singapore, and so forth. It took a long time to build up the level of

trust and engagement that the US has had in both Europe and Asia. And that actually is an arsenal of sorts when it comes to thinking about trade as well. Of course, it may be the case, it probably is the case right now, the US wants to rethink the way that global trade fits into its wider vision of itself in the world. But it's worth remembering that allies can help with those changes. They don't have to be seen as adversaries. And that China is a country that will be very happy in many ways to take up those trade links

if it thinks they're being abandoned by the United States. So making sure that those alliances are renewed for the 2020s rather than being abandoned, that's a really key part of the diplomacy of this decade. And yet the Biden administration does not appear to have been able to make any inroad strength in relations with that country. The show is ending, and I know that could be a whole other show, but if you just have a comment on why that was the case.

Well, they did manage to, I think they did manage to actually calm things down. In 2023, the meeting between President Xi and Biden meant that things like military to military communications started up again. That was better. Which had been in store for a while. But they had a rocky start. Yeah.

They had a rocky start, but I think they ended up in a place where there was a conversation to be had. And the point as we're coming to the end, I think, Mina, is that that conversation, I think, is still there waiting to be picked up. And I will point out again, it's no lesser person than President Donald Trump, who has said that he's waiting for President Xi Jinping to pick up the phone. Now, President Xi may not pick up the phone.

But I hope that people working for both presidents are picking up phones behind the scenes and talking to each other about the next phase of U.S.-China relations. And here's a little prediction for you. I think a deal, maybe not next few weeks, but by the fall between the U.S. and China on these trade issues is not impossible. You can always have me back in the fall and hold me to that. That's my prediction for the end of the show. Well, we'd like to do that. Rana Mitter, S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mina. It's been a pleasure.

And my thanks as well to Mark Nieto for producing today's segment. And as always, to our listeners for their comments and insights and poetry as well in that last comment that I read from a listener. You've been listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

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