Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping managed to keep United States (US)-China tensions contained in 2024, but when Donald Trump strides back into the White House later this month, he will break this fragile stability, driving an unmanaged decoupling of the world’s most important geopolitical relationship and increasing the risk of global economic disruption and crisis.

Trump will begin his second term as US president by announcing new tariffs on Chinese goods in order to force a new economic agreement on Beijing. These new tariffs won’t reach the 60% blanket tariff level he threatened during the election campaign, but the top rate on all Chinese imports is likely to double to about 25% by the end of 2025.

China’s leaders, meanwhile, will respond more forcefully and offer fewer concessions than during Trump’s first term, despite the continuing weakness of China’s economy. They fear that a conciliatory approach will stoke already rising public anger in China by appearing to accept a national humiliation. If their more constructive approach toward the US of the past year only brought them the return of “Tariff Man” Trump and more of his threats, they might well wonder, why stick to a pragmatic path? Trump’s threats are the latest in a long line of aggressions from Washington that confirm the suspicions of many in Beijing that US policymakers are intent on containing China’s rise as a great power.

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