As far as first salvos go, President Donald J. Trump’s threat of a 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods in retaliation for China’s role in America’s fentanyl crisis could be interpreted in Beijing as encouraging.
Not only is it lower than the 60 percent duties Mr. Trump had said he would impose on key Chinese goods during his campaign, it also reaffirmed signals that the president was in the mood to negotiate with China. In his first two days in office Mr. Trump has also floated the idea of tying tariffs to the fate of TikTok. He has said he expects to be invited to China for a visit.
Mr. Trump’s apparent willingness to make deals with China could give Beijing much-needed time and space to tackle its most pressing needs. That includes trying to turn around a stagnant economy and ease tensions with trading partners over China’s record trade surplus of nearly $1 trillion. Beijing has also been working to repair ties with American allies like Japan to try to weaken the security alliances forged by the Biden administration to constrain China.
Making headway on those fronts will help China strengthen its position in what has been a punishing superpower rivalry with the United States. Beijing ultimately wants the Trump administration to reset relations. It has argued that the United States should remove restrictions on Chinese imports of U.S. technology, stop supporting Taiwan, the self-governed island claimed by Beijing, and accept China as a peer power.
Beijing may be calculating that it can placate Mr. Trump, perhaps with a TikTok sale, a crackdown on fentanyl precursor producers, or a refresh of the trade deal Mr. Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, signed in 2020, analysts said.
“From an economic perspective, it’d be in Washington’s and Beijing’s interests to come up with some kind of a pseudo grand bargain that met both sides’ immediate political needs without sacrificing too much,” said Scott Kennedy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
It is unclear where Mr. Trump, who considers unpredictability to be his signature weapon, stands on any of these issues. The U.S. president has surrounded himself with advisers with contrasting views on China. His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said as recently as last week at his Senate confirmation hearing that China was the “biggest threat” to American prosperity. But one of Mr. Trump’s billionaire advisers, Elon Musk, the tycoon who owns Tesla, has vast business interests in China and has taken Beijing’s side on international disputes (such as Taiwan).
Mr. Trump’s first days back have quickly highlighted the early differences between the Biden and Trump administrations when it comes to dealing with China. Where the previous administration favored sanctions and alliances to shape the global environment around China, the Trump White House appears intent to use tariffs as part of a carrot and stick strategy to achieve its domestic “America First” goals.
China is thought to welcome the new approach, at least for now, as long as it leaves room for China to try to fend off a full-blown trade war. Its economy is already facing a deepening malaise, brought on by a property crisis, mounting government debt and weak consumer spending.
China’s economic challenges mean its bargaining position is weaker than it had been in the first Trump administration. But Beijing also has more tools now to fight back.
China has demonstrated in recent months that it is willing to use new measures to retaliate, including by restricting American access to important minerals, investigating U.S. companies like PVH for boycotting Xinjiang cotton and sanctioning Skydio, a U.S. drone maker supplying Ukraine’s military.
“China’s ready to go either way. They’re ready for a battle or for bargaining,” said Mr. Kennedy, who tried to gauge the mood in China during his two-week stay there after the U.S. presidential election.
The first big test for where U.S.-China relations go under a second Trump term could center on the future of the Chinese social media app, TikTok, in America.
On Monday, Mr. Trump signed an executive order delaying a ban of the platform. Then he suggested Beijing should approve a deal to split ownership of the app with an American buyer, or he would impose tariffs as high as 100 percent.
“If Trump can strike a deal that addresses national security concerns while keeping the app alive, he’ll be hailed as a hero by young voters,” said Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research organization in Washington. If ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, “won’t bend, he can blame Beijing, framing them as the barrier to progress.”
A compromise on TikTok might be acceptable to China. The app is not what China considers strategic, leading-edge technology, like the A.I. chips and supercomputing capabilities that Mr. Xi covets to make his country more powerful and self-sufficient. China opposed the sale of TikTok in 2023, but has lately appeared to soften its stance, saying through a foreign ministry spokeswoman that any acquisition of a business should adhere to “market principles” and “Chinese laws and regulations.”
China has also sought to remind Mr. Trump of China’s geopolitical sway. On Tuesday, Mr. Xi held a video call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a leader with whom he has bonded, as two autocrats battling Western pressure. Mr. Xi said they should “deepen strategic coordination, firmly support each other, and defend their legitimate interests.”
The call underscored Beijing’s influence over Russia at a time when Mr. Trump has expressed a desire to bring an end to the fighting in Ukraine. Separately, it signaled an enduring solidarity between Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin despite the presence of Han Zheng, China’s vice president, at Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
“Xi wants to have all his bases covered,” said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington. “He wants to show Trump that China still has Russia in its corner.”
For now, Mr. Xi has sought to strike a positive note with Mr. Trump, expressing hope for a “good start” to the countries’ relations under the new administration during a call with Mr. Trump on Friday.
But he also drew a hard line on China’s concerns, urging Mr. Trump to handle the status of Taiwan with prudence. In 2016, Mr. Trump took a call from Tsai Ing-wen, who was then Taiwan’s president, drawing China’s condemnation.
Already, though, some of Mr. Trump’s decisions are playing into China’s broader global ambition of reshaping the global order to give Beijing a bigger say. Mr. Trump’s moves to pull the United States out of the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement, a U.N. climate pact, and his willingness to alienate partners like Mexico and Canada with 25 percent tariffs, arguably serve China’s longer-term interests.
Still, Chinese analysts said Beijing was proceeding with immense caution. They feel China was burned at the start of Mr. Trump’s first term, when he turned on the charm, inviting Mr. Xi to Mar-a-Lago where they dined on cake. A year later, the relationship began its steady dive to the worst level since diplomatic relations were normalized in the 1970s.
Mr. Trump “wants to try to solve problems in a nonconfrontational way at first, but he will definitely bargain for more, so we must also be mentally prepared,” said Wu Xinbo, the dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Siyi Zhao contributed research.