US president sends belated new year wishes, but failure to contact Beijing counterpart almost three weeks after inauguration is prompting questions
US president Donald Trump makes a call from the Oval Office of the White House – but not to China’s president Xi Jinping. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP
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Tom Phillips in Beijing
Thursday 9 February 2017 05.37 GMTLast modified on Thursday 9 February 2017 05.55 GMT
Donald Trump has reportedly yelled down the telephone at Australia’s prime minister and veered off into rants about China and Nato with French leader François Hollande
So the leader of the world’s second largest economy, Xi Jinping, may feel he got off lightly with nothing more than a letter.
Almost three weeks after Trump’s inauguration, that was how the US president decided to engage with his Chinese counterpart, in what observers described as a further indication of the dark clouds now gathering over US-China relations.
In a statement, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump had used the missive to tell Xi he was looking forward to working with him “to develop a constructive relationship that benefits both the United States and China”.
Trump also wished the Chinese people a happy Year of the Rooster, although those tidings came almost a fortnight late.
Eyebrows have been raised by the fact that Trump has not held a conversation with Xi since his inauguration, despite finding time to speak to at least 18 world leaders and post 112 tweets on his @realDonaldTrumpaccount.
“It’s a sign that bad times lie ahead in the US-China relationship,” said Nick Bisley, an international relations expert from La Trobe University in Melbourne. “China is very much being lined up by Trump’s people as not quite enemy number one but something approximating that.”
Bisley said he believed Trump’s failure to line up a phone date with Xi was part of a deliberate ploy to annoy and publicly embarrass Beijing.
“That’s just the way Trump likes things … This is not, ‘Oh, crap! We forgot about the Chinese!’ This is a considered cocking of the snook.”
In a report released on Tuesday, some of the world’s leading China experts warned that the combination of Trump’s volatility and Xi’s increasingly aggressive and autocratic rule threatened to plunge already precarious US-China relations into a dangerous new era.
Both before and after his shock election Trump has repeatedly signalled he will take a hard line with China, which he has accused of currency manipulation, militarising the South China Sea and not doing enough to help the US rein in North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
In his campaign manifesto, Great Again: How To Fix Our Crippled America, the tycoon wrote: “There are people who wish I wouldn’t refer to China as our enemy. But that’s exactly what they are.”
Trump’s letter to Xi follows a “congratulatory note” sent by the Chinese president to his US counterpart on the day of his 20 January inauguration.
China’s foreign ministry has been coy about revealing the contents of Xi’s note, which was not widely reported in the Chinese media.
China urges Trump: be our friend, not our enemy
Asked to divulge Xi’s message to Trump, spokesperson Hua Chunying would say only that it had been a congratulatory note that had said congratulations. She declined to comment further.
Chinese academics gave Trump’s letter a tepid reception.
“It’s better than nothing, but it’s only a very small gesture,” Shi Yinhong, a Renmin University professor and government foreign policy adviser, told Bloomberg.
Shi said Trump’s policy on China was still unclear but “all the signs so far point to a combative approach”.
China specialists believe the US billionaire president and Xi, a member of China’s so-called red nobility, are unlikely to hit it off.
In a recent interview, Winston Lord, Ronald Reagan’s former ambassador to Beijing, told the Guardian he believed it was essential for the US president to engage in continual one-on-one strategic discussions with China’s leader.
But the veteran diplomat, who helped reestablish diplomatic relations with Mao’s China in the early 1970s, said he doubted such a relationship was possible “because Trump is not a reflective strategic thinker”.
“Ideally, I would like the leaders to have this. But if it didn’t work out that well with someone as thoughtful and cerebral and strategic as Obama, I don’t know how it could possibly work out with Trump,” Lord said.
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