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US-China trade war
ChinaDiplomacy

China tries to bridge gap in knowledge about the US following criticism that misreading of Donald Trump helped trigger trade war

  • Beijing provides major funding boost for research on American studies and trade
  • Move follows complaints that US president’s policies took academics and government by surprise

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Critics claim that a lack of understanding of the US caused China to misread the situation in the run-up to the trade war. Photo: Shutterstock
Zhenhua Lu

China has increased the number of government-funded studies into the US and trade this year following criticism that gaps in the country’s understanding of America has left policymakers unprepared to deal with Donald Trump’s presidency and the subsequent trade war.

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When Trump started the still-unresolved dispute last July, Chinese academics faced heavy criticism that they had underestimated the US president and his administration’s resolve to confront Beijing.

That month a number of academics and policy advisers said that tightening government controls on think tanks and the difficulty of getting approval to travel to the US to meet their counterparts had led to a situation where both senior officials and researchers “didn’t realise how bad things were getting” in Washington.

A couple of weeks before the start of the trade war, the annual funding round announced by the National Social Science Fund of China approved 18 projects focusing on American studies and just three concentrating on trade.

This year, however, of the 143 foreign affairs projects unveiled on Tuesday, 24 will focus on the US and 12 on trade, while others will touch on these areas to some degree.

Meanwhile, in research guidance published in December, the fund listed 92 foreign affairs projects for which academics could apply for funding – 20 of which concentrated on the US or trade. The previous year’s guidance had only listed four.

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