Opinion | Trump is placating China — America’s most prominent adversary - The Washington Post

[Key Wu]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/12/16/trump-china-xi-jinping/

America first? Not when Trump is dealing with China.

The president’s second-term China policy started out aggressive. That quickly changed.

Derek Scissors is chief economist of the China Beige Book. Zack Cooper is a lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University. Both writers are senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute.

In the roughly 10 months since his return to the White House, President Donald Trump has made many threats against perceived adversaries. He has even followed through on some of them — for example, against Iran. The president has been remarkably generous, though, toward the United States’ most prominent adversary: China. Since April, Trump has repeatedly given ground to the People’s Republic. He did it again last week by agreeing to allow export of the advanced H200 chip to Chinese customers.

Trump’s second-term China policy started out aggressive, with a series of announcements about raising tariffs on Chinese products from 25 percent to 145 percent. By early spring, however, tariffs faded into the background as an issue in U.S.-China trade, because on April 4, China countered with new, stricter export controls on rare-earth materials, including for the first time rare-earth magnets.

Rare earths are valuable to a range of U.S. economic sectors. The auto industry, in particular, warned that without low-cost but indispensable rare-earth magnets, assembly lines might be shut down. This was quite a predictable predicament, as Beijing had long bragged about its rare-earth reserves and used export limits in disputes.