Donald Trump’s least appreciated quality is his lack of martial instincts towards China. This puts him in a minority in Washington DC, including in his own administration. Whatever Trump’s faults, toying with a third world war is not among them. The same does not apply to his approach to trade, where he embraces perpetual warfare. If he could extend his grasp of mutual assured destruction to trade, he might be on a better path.
唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)最不被重视的品质是他对中国没什么战争意识。这使得他在华盛顿特区——包括他领导的美国行政当局内部——属于少数派。无论特朗普有多少缺点，冒着引发第三次世界大战的风险蛮干都不在其中。他的贸易策略则不是这样；他在该领域信奉永无休止的战争。如果他能将他对“相互确保摧毁”(MAD)的领悟延伸到贸易领域，或许他会进入更好的境界。
As I wrote recently, Trump is a gift that keeps on giving to China, and his latest trade brinkmanship is likely to end in another climbdown. But we should not forget how frequently non-Maga Washington has misread Beijing. When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the consensus was that it would inevitably liberalise as it climbed the value-added chain. The more China’s economy shifted to services, the more it would need democracy to enable its creative classes.
就像我最近所写，特朗普就像一份送给中国的厚礼，不断给中国带来好处，他在贸易领域的最新“边缘政策”(brinkmanship)很可能以又一次退让告终。但我们不应忘记，“让美国再次伟大”(MAGA)圈子外的华盛顿对北京的误判有多频繁。2001年中国加入世界贸易组织(WTO)时，人们的共识是，随着中国向增值链上方攀升，它将不可避免地走上自由化道路。中国经济越是向服务业转型，它就越需要民主来让其创意阶层施展才华。
This proved 100 per cent wrong. China under Jiang Zemin at the start of this century was far less unfree than it is today under Xi Jinping. Yet its economy is more than 15 times larger today. The second Washington mistake as the aughts progressed was to assume that China could not innovate. This was an offshoot of the first error. Since China was autocratic, the reasoning went, the free spirit of commercial research and experimentation would be lacking. The most China could do would be to rip off western companies by leveraging its vast market to coerce them into transferring technology.
这已被证明完全错误。相比今天习近平领导下的中国，21世纪初江泽民领导下的中国的不自由程度低得多。然而中国经济现在的规模是当时的15倍有余。随着时间的推移，华盛顿的第二个错误是假设中国无力创新；这是第一个错误的衍生品。当时的逻辑是，由于中国实行专制，它将缺乏商业化研究和实验所需的自由精神。中国所能做的充其量就是占西方企业的便宜，利用中国的庞大市场迫使外企转让技术。