The US and China in the Era of Donald Trump

The election of Donald Trump has introduced a big question mark into America’s relations with China. Will the new president start a trade war with the world’s second biggest economy? Will Trump attempt to refashion America’s relations with Taiwan and thus infuriate Beijing? Will Trump’s vow to build more US naval vessels place the US and China on a path to conflict in the South China Sea? How will Trump handle the prospects of a North Korea armed with nuclear weapons and an intercontinental ballistic missile with which to deliver them?

As for China, how will it react to this new administration, which espouses a decidedly different view of China than the one that predominated in Washington over the past several decades? Will China adopt the role of “responsible global stakeholder” in contrast to Trump’s “America first” ideology? Or will China join the US in a race to the bottom, precipitating further ideological, economic and geostrategic competition that pulls the world down with it?

John Pomfret is the author of the critically-acclaimed The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China from 1776 to the Present. He is also an award-winning author who spent decades as a foreign correspondent with The Washington Post. He has lived in China for 20 years since the early 1980s and also covered US-China relations from Washington, DC. As The New York Times said of The Beautiful Country, “Donald Trump (or his next secretary of state) would be well advised to read this timely and comprehensively informative book.”

Lunch Provided.
Please register by Thursday Feb. 16th: http://www.du.edu/korbel/china/events/forums.html

[Free]

SIE Complex – 5th Floor – Maglione Hall

2201 S. Gaylord St., Denver, CO 80208