Trump’s idiosyncratic “art of the deal” apparently means putting extreme pressure on your negotiating partner to force them to surrender — but the US approach is based on faulty Trumpian economic assumptions and a misread of China’s growth history, and will only backfire.

“They would like to make a deal. We’re not ready to make a deal.”

China would like to make a deal, U.S. president says in Japan. Tariffs on Chinese goods could go up ‘very easily,’ he says

Why was the Chinese government unwilling to accept Trump’s last minute demands during trade talks? Look to history: 2019 marks the centenary of the anti-imperialist May 4th movement. China can hardly be accepted to surrender to a 21st-century “unequal treaty”—if the US government understood this aspect of Chinese culture better, negotiations would proceed more smoothly.

The trade war has not gone as U.S. policymakers expected—China has not given up easily. This overconfidence came from an inflated view of America’s market boom, which is merely a short-term “sugar high” produced by Republican tax cuts. A more serious misjudgment was underestimating China’s economic strength and national resolve.

While the trade war clearly hurts China more than the US, in both absolute and relative terms, data and historical experience show that these losses are manageable for the Chinese economy.

"If we agree with Washington's claims on trade this time, it will use other excuses to curb China's development."

The United States is at least a month from enacting its proposed tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese imports as it studies the impact on American consumers, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Wednesday.