China-US Relations and the Emerging Multipolar World Order
by Professor Alejandro Reyes
Donald Trump does not return to the White House until January 20, 2025, but in his campaign and since his election victory, he has set out two aspects of his foreign policy: first, tariffs and trade sanctions will be tools for getting what his administration wants whether from friend or foe, and second, partners and allies will have to pay more for their security and the privilege of having the United States guarantee it for them. The US is not retreating from the world as much as it is focusing more on what it wants and needs as the primary motivation for its foreign policy – America will come first.
To underscore his commitment to keeping the promises he made on the stump, the once and future president has announced that on his first day back in office he will issue an executive order imposing 25 percent tariffs on all products from Canada and Mexico and tougher levies on goods from China. He linked the punitive measures on the two neighbors and free-trade agreement partners to the influx of migrants crossing their borders and connected the move on Chinese products, already heavily taxed, to the opioids crisis and the flow of fentanyl into the US.
This threat is the “transactional” president-elect’s tactic to get the target countries to the negotiating table. But to call them to the carpet for what? Under the Biden administration’s border-security regime imposed by executive order in June 2024 after Republicans killed a bipartisan immigration reform bill at Trump’s urging, the arrival of migrants across the border from Mexico dropped off significantly, while up north it is the movement of people from the US to Canada, especially those fearing deportation, that is more of an issue. As for dangerous drugs, at the Xi-Biden summit in November last year, China agreed to reduce the stream of fentanyl precursor chemicals and pill presses. That effort has had promising but still modest results.
We are in a time of performative diplomacy in which countries are taking decisions or asserting policies that are not necessarily in their own national interest but are designed to cater to, satisfy or signal to a particular group or a political base that the leadership is taking action on a domestic priority or cause. The death of expertise – not just a trend in the US and the West – is really about the eclipse, maybe not all the time, of evidence-based policy making by the geopolitics of emotion, the playing to a gallery, often for short-term political ends. The policy’s effectiveness may not even matter; it is the mere delivery that is important.
Trump’s tariffs are more about demonstrating resolve and taking some kind of dramatic punitive action than they are about achieving policy objectives. In China’s case, its aggressive actions in the South China Sea are as much about rallying the citizen support as they are about asserting sovereignty or securing access to possible sources of energy.
A broader context of global geopolitics of course is the China-US rivalry. In a world of diplomatic performance over substance, the result is a high-stress, high-stakes battle for hearts and minds, for countries in the middle to choose a team, for partners and allies to fall in line. Both Beijing and Washington maintain that they are not making nations pick sides, but often they are doing just that. After 9-11, George W. Bush famously said that “you’re either with us or with the terrorists”. Violent extremism was one thing, but cleaving the world over chips and electric vehicles is quite another.
This bipolar dynamic, set to intensify in the Trump sequel, poses a quandary for all nations: How can a country make choices that are genuinely in their national interest rather than toe a China or US line? Easy for some, harder for others. A country can whinge about the problem, pleading with the coercive powers not to force it to pick a side. A country can cringe or recoil – turn inward and pretend to be oblivious or above the pressures and promises coming its way. A country can binge – choose a team and go all in with slavish allegiance. Or a country can hinge by understanding its capacity to swing one way or the other and try to make choices that are in its genuine national interest.
The latitude for hinging between China and the US varies, depending on different factors including geography, political system, economic and trade relationship, strategic relationship, cultural affinity and even history. Canada, for example, has a narrow hinging latitude primarily because of its geographic position and its deep economic and strategic integration with the United States. Pakistan would have limited hinging due to its relations with India, its economic ties with China and its geographical location. Meanwhile, countries such as India or Vietnam might be able to hinge more widely, hewing towards the US on some issues and to China on others.
If the China-US great power competition is set to be a central geopolitical narrative for the foreseeable future, then countries will have to master their hinging skills. This is not just about balancing; it is about maximizing agency. The predicament for some will be that a narrow hinging capacity will mean that they may be prone or even forced to make decisions against their national interest, actions that are often simply performative or even self-destructive.
This is the multipolar world that is emerging. To aid their hinging, countries will seek out or enhance their participation in various groupings, partnerships or frameworks, pooling resources, resilience, competitiveness, and bargaining power. We see this in the efforts (to varying degrees) of regional groupings such as the EU and ASEAN to assert strategic autonomy and chart their own course. It is evident, too, in the emergence of frameworks, groupings or partnerships based on coinciding, aligning or at least adjacent interests such as the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Quad, AUKUS, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, or the Ottawa Group for reform of the World Trade Organization.
What countries do not want is a decoupled G2 world, in which there are two distinct camps and everybody is stuck wearing one jersey – or an unruly G-Zero without order and effective cooperative frameworks. The multipolar world is one in which each country will be in perpetual Brownian motion, shifting according to issue, interests and values. A world order based on pragmatism, a variety of willing coalitions, and the basic desire for real agency.
Professor Alejandro Reyes is Senior Fellow at the Centre on Contemporary China and the World (CCCW), The University of Hong Kong. He was previously adjunct professor and director of knowledge dissemination at the Asia Global Institute, the think tank on global issues at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), where he managed the digital journal AsiaGlobal Online. He is currently teaching in the Department of Politics and Public Administration (PPA) as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Hong Kong.