Transcript | Brookings' Patricia Kim Takes Stock of Trump's Second-Term China Policy
Transcript (courtesy of the fantastic CadreScripts) further down the page. Image by Keya Zhou. Listen in the embedded player above!
This week on Sinica, I speak with Patricia Kim, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, where she focuses on U.S. policy toward China and the broader Asia Pacific. One year into Donald Trump’s second term, Pattie and her colleague Joyce Yang have published a comprehensive Brookings assessment titled “Making America Great Again? Evaluating Trump’s China strategy at the one-year mark,” which examines whether the administration’s stated objectives on reindustrialization, AI leadership, strategic dependence, and global standing are actually being met. We discuss the paradox of Trump’s China policy (which is surprising consistency in goals despite the absence of a formal strategy document), with its mixed results on economic rebalancing and supply chain security, the troubling deterioration in U.S.-China diplomatic and military channels, and why the administration’s approach to allies and partners may be undermining its own objectives. Pattie brings analytical discipline and empirical rigor to debates that are often long on rhetoric and short on evidence, cutting through a lot of noise to assess what’s actually working, what isn’t, and where the strategy is running up against reality.
4:45 – Does Trump have a China strategy? Consistency without a formal framework
8:15 – Assessing the economic rebalancing goals: reindustrialization and tariffs
15:30 – Technology competition: export controls and AI leadership
23:45 – Supply chain security and strategic dependence challenges
31:20 – The deterioration of diplomatic and military-to-military channels
39:50 – The ally and partner problem: how Trump’s approach undermines his own goals
47:15 – Global standing and American credibility in the Trump era
52:30 – Paying it forward: The Lost in Translation series at Brookings
Paying it forward:
Lost in Translation Series (Brookings Global China Project)
Recommendations:
Pattie: To Dare Mighty Things by Michael O’Hanlon
Kaiser: Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman
Transcript Follows:
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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Today, we are turning to the state of U.S.-China policy, one year into Donald Trump’s second term, not through slogans or the daily headlines, but through a clear-eyed assessment of what has actually changed, what hasn’t, and where the strategy is running up against reality. My guest is Patricia Kim, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where she focuses on U.S. policy toward China and the broader Asia Pacific. Pattie has served previously in policy roles spanning the executive branch and the think tank world, and she’s widely respected for bringing analytical discipline and empirical rigor to debates that are often long on rhetoric and short on evidence.
So last month, Pattie coauthored a Brookings assessment, taking Stock of Trump’s China Strategy at the one-year mark, looking hard at the administration’s own stated goals on reindustrialization, AI leadership, strategic dependance, and global standing, and asking, you know, a simple but quite bracing question — are these policies actually delivering the results they promised? It’s a piece that cuts through a lot of noise, and it’s one, you know, I’ve been eager to discuss, especially given how much has happened in the week since it was published on January 16th.
So, Joyce Yang was the coauthor of this as well. Pattie, though, it is just such a pleasure to finally have you on Sinica. This conversation is long overdue. A warm welcome to the show.
Pattie Kim: Thank you, Kaiser. It’s great to be on your show.
Kaiser: So, Pattie, let me start at a really high altitude because this is a criticism that you hear constantly. You heard it in the Biden administration as well that the Trump administration doesn’t actually have a China strategy. There’s been no major speech, there’s no doctrine, no capstone document that just sort of lays it all out. You can sort of piece it together. And of course, you have Trump acting, as your colleague Ryan said on the show recently, very much as his own China desk officer. And yet, as you point out in the paper, there is a surprising degree of consistency when it comes to the administration’s stated objectives. Again, to rebalancing the U.S. economic relationship through reindustrialization. That’s been a big priority.
Maintaining dominance in critical technologies, especially in AI, reducing dependance on China-controlled supply chains, and restoring, insofar as that’s possible, American respect abroad. So, how should we reconcile these two things? Is this a case of relatively clear objectives paired with highly improvisational execution? Or does the sort of absence of an institutionalized strategy, something that you can point to and articulate clearly, is that itself becoming a limiting factor when it comes to delivering results?
Pattie: Yeah, I mean, Kaiser, those are great questions. And real quick, before we get to the substance, I want to acknowledge my coauthor, and thank you for pointing her out — Joyce Yang. Joyce is one of our top research assistants at the Brookings China Center. And she was a wonderful intellectual partner and a driving force behind this report. So, turning to your question about the Trump administration’s framing of China policy, the reason why there’s such an ongoing debate among China watchers about whether the administration actually has a coherent China strategy is because we haven’t really seen a single major speech or a policy paper that lays out a comprehensive China framework.
President Trump. He hasn’t delegated China policy to a formal interagency process in the way that past administrations have. As you just mentioned, he’s taken a very personalized approach to China. And, in fact, Trump is indeed described often as his own China desk officer. And it’s very clear that he places significant weight on his personal relationship with President Xi Jinping, and this conviction that leader-level diplomacy can succeed where bureaucratic processes fall short.
That said, I think Trump has held fairly consistent views about China that long predate his second term. Those views are articulated quite clearly in the latest National Security Strategy, which says three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China and the decisions to open U.S. markets to China, encourage American firms to invest in China, and to offshore manufacturing helped create a rich and powerful competitor while hollowing out U.S. industry, weakening America’s economic autonomy, and creating serious national vulnerabilities.
So, this is sort of the core view that the administration holds. And what’s interesting is that in this second term, they’ve been very deliberate about stepping away from the language of great power competition. And this is a shift from the first Trump term when this framework was officially or explicitly…
Kaiser: Embraced. Yeah.
Pattie: Embraced. Yeah, exactly, by the administration. But again, even without this framing, we do see a fairly consistent set of objectives that Trump and his senior officials often emphasize. And these revolve around rebalancing the U.S.-China economic relationship and restoring American strength vis-à-vis China by, one, reindustrializing the U.S., maintaining U.S. dominance in critical technologies, reducing strategic dependency on Chinese-controlled supply chains, and restoring respect for the U.S. globally. And what I’d finally note is that not many of these goals are not necessarily unique to this administration. In fact, there’s broad bipartisan consensus that many of these objectives matter. The Biden administration pursued many of the same ends, though with a different set of policy tools and approaches. But in any case, these are the aims that we think the Trump administration has set out for judging its own China policy. And they’re the ones that we look at in the report.
Kaiser: Yeah. You’ve anticipated what I was going to ask you, which was about that sort of institutional inertia, despite the fact that he’s just so personal about it that so much of Trump’s China policy comes down to his instincts, his impatience with process, his preference, as you say, for kind of leader to leader dynamics which he puts over institutionalized relationships, his fondness for the deal and the leverage, and the spectacle, frankly. But I sense, as you say, there’s a lot of continuity from the Biden administration, there are a lot of the same goals articulated, maybe differently, and with very different tools available to them or that they prefer. But I mean, just candidly, if Trump were suddenly removed from the picture, how much of this trajectory do you think would actually change in substance as opposed to tone and execution? These would be sort of the American goals if Kamala Harris had won in November, right?
Pattie: Yeah. I mean, that’s a great question. I think I agree with that. I think they would broadly stay consistent. But obviously, the policy tools for achieving these ends would probably change.
