SUPERPOWER SHOWDOWN

In December 2018, an informal poll of 75 corporate executives attending a Washington, D.C., conference showed that roughly 50% believed that, in light of recent trade history, the U.S. and China would be at war within 30 years. Davis, a Pulitzer-winning senior editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau, and Wei, who works at the Journal’s Beijing bureau, depict this “romance gone bad” by focusing on the first three years of the Trump administration. According to the authors, a series of miscalculations and misunderstandings on both sides have brought the two nations to the current impasse. Chinese President Xi Jinping has failed to appreciate how his government’s subsidization of private companies and implausible denials of technological theft have alienated American officials. As for Donald Trump, the authors persuasively argue that his protectionist policies vis-à-vis China have achieved mixed results at best. Yet Trump “deserves credit for challenging the easy assumptions about China that had guided American policy since at least the Clinton administration,” particularly the idea that economic engagement would lead to political liberalization. General readers may be forgiven for skimming the more detailed passages, which depict the seemingly endless series of trade talks and controversies. Yet the authors skillfully enliven what could have been a dull narrative. Particularly diverting are the biographical sketches of the participants in the trade talks—including that of Peter Navarro, the profane hard-line economist in Trump’s administration—and a number of illuminating anecdotes and facts. China, for example, had the world’s largest economy “until roughly the U.S. Civil War,” and the Chinese refer to those who return home after working overseas as “hai gui,” or “sea turtles.”

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