A Communist party-controlled newspaper has launched a searing attack on Donald Trump after the president-elect threatened a realignment of his country’s policies towards China, warning the US president-elect: “Pride goes before a fall.”



The Global Times, a notoriously rambunctious state-run tabloid, was writing after Trump reignited a simmering row with Beijing by suggesting he might recognise Taiwan, which China regards as a breakaway province, unless Beijing agreed a new “deal” with his administration.

Trump’s move came less than a fortnight after the billionaire infuriated Beijing by holding a 10-minute telephone conversation with Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen.

In a tough-talking editorial published on Tuesday the newspaper, which sometimes reflects official views, claimed the “calculating businessman” might feel he had pulled off a shrewd manoeuvre by “seizing China’s fate by the throat”.

“However, the truth is this inexperienced president-elect probably has no knowledge of what he’s talking about. He has overestimated the US’ capability of dominating the world and fails to understand the limitation of US powers in the current era,” it warned, calling on the Chinese government to respond with “surprise moves”.

Trump’s comments revealed he “despises China strategically”, the newspaper added, warning: “Pride goes before a fall. Even before entering the White House, he has already put his cards over blackmailing China on the table … What reason do we have to accept a most unfair and humiliating deal from Trump?”

Speaking to the same newspaper, a Chinese scholar sought to hammer home the point. “[Trump’s] remarks have not only jeopardised world peace, but also upset the Beijing-Washington relationship ... he will pay for his mistakes,” warned Niu Xinchun from the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

Jessica Chen Weiss, an expert in Chinese foreign policy and politics from Cornell University, said the increasingly tough language coming out of Beijing was part of a campaign to “educate” Trump and his team before his inauguration on 20 January.



If the president-elect refused to change tack, behind-the-scenes countermeasures might be rolled out to ensure the Republican understood the dangers of challenging China.



Weiss said Beijing would now be looking for “pressure points that Trump might be responsive to”, particularly on the economic front. “You can imagine China making its harder for American businesses in China to operate; nothing official, but certain actions that might serve as a warning to the US business community that this isn’t going to end well if Trump continues,” she said.

“I don’t think we are seeing that yet – I think it is likely to wait. It may well wait until Trump takes specific actions. It’s one thing to question a policy or talk about revising it and it is another to take actions that indicate greater recognition for Taiwan as a sovereign state,” Weiss added.



Experts say Beijing has an array of weapons in its armoury with which it could respond to what it considers Trump’s “provocations”.



They include weakening China’s currency, the renminbi, in order to hurt US exporters, or seeking warming ties with North Korea and pumping economic aid into Pyongyang.

There are fears in Taiwan, an independently and democratically ruled island to which Beijing lays claim, that it could face severe economic or political retaliation from China before the US is targeted.

Possible measures against Taiwan include a diplomatic offensive which would see Beijing seek to seduce Taipei’s already meagre stock of 22 allies which include Haiti, Paraguay and São Tomé and Príncipe, one of Africa’s smallest nations.



Weiss said it remained unclear whether Trump would carry his “wild talk” on China into the White House. But the tycoon’s arrival in power had raised the prospect of a dramatic and potentially catastrophic falling-out between the world’s two largest economies.



“It could be a rupture in the US-China relationship that we haven’t seen yet,” she said. “I’m not at all optimistic”.