President Trump’s trade war with China is hurting the Asian power’s once-burgeoning aviation industry, according to a top official at Airbus.
“This will have a negative impact on China’s aviation growth,” Xu Gang, chief executive of Airbus China, told reporters at a biennial air show in the country. “Nobody will be the winner of this kind of trade war.”
Trump and China have hit each other with billions of dollars worth retaliatory tariffs over the last year. Vice President Mike Pence has issued denunciations of Chinese regional aggression and intellectual property theft, while China has said the U.S. is undermining the multilateral global order that has facilitated its rise. But the air show and a parallel economic forum saw the communist power take a more modest and conciliatory tone.
“The Chinese side is ready to have discussions with the U.S. on issues of mutual concern to push for a proposal acceptable to both sides to resolve their economic and trade issues,” Vice President Wang Qishan said while traveling in Singapore, according to the South China Morning Post. “Negativity and anger are not the way to address the problems that have emerged from globalization, nor will barriers and disputes help solve one’s own problems; instead, they will only exacerbate global market turbulence.”
Trump has acknowledged repeatedly that China would like to negotiate an end to the trade war, but he stresses that the conflict must continue until it can end on his terms.
“Both sides still think they have the upper hand,” Scott Kennedy, deputy director of China studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Bloomberg at the Singapore forum. “They’ll continue to do this dance, and all of us will continue to watch.”
Part of that dance, for China, involves muting some of the ebullient displays that has grown common in recent years. The China air show, for instance, saw budget cuts due to a combination of trade war concerns and a desire for a tactical shift in propaganda.
“The organizers did not invite the [Russian] Knights and Swifts teams this year, nor the Red Arrows from Britain, just because of a lack of funding,” a source told the Morning Post. “A more low-profile air show indicates the Beijing leadership wants to tone down its previous ‘overconfident’ propaganda style and return to its original taoguang yanghui [lie low] policy during the ongoing trade frictions with the U.S.”
That “lie low” policy has been a hallmark of China’s engagement with the West for decades, the U.S. intelligence community now believes.
“We Americans still don’t see China the way it now sees us,” top China expert Michael Pillsbury wrote in The Hundred-Year Marathon, a book derived from award-winning analysis at the CIA. “[Chinese] stratagems are designed to defeat a more powerful opponent by using the opponent’s own strength against him, without his knowing he is even in a contest.”
