But now, as China experiences a growth slowdown—one that is already causing serious ructions among middle-class investors, many of whom have been devastated by the collapse of its lightly regulated peer-to-peer lending platforms , and low-skilled migrant workers, who’ve been hit by the offshoring of low-wage manufacturing employment to lower-cost locales elsewhere in Asia—the Firewall, and the party-state it shields from criticism, face a test.

China’s social-media censors must anticipate which stories might fuel opposition, which could come from workers organizing wildcat strikes, the Marxist Maoists of the campus left, or the increasingly vocal nationalist right. Or perhaps it could come from salaried professionals in big cities bristling at the prospect of finally having to pay income taxes . Sooner or later, even the most sophisticated censorship regime will buckle. The only question is when. And that is why American policy makers ought to adopt a new approach to China.

Consider that the party-state has been particularly keen to police conversations about Donald Trump’s trade war and its own agonized response. For the most part, this has been reported as a reflection of Beijing’s desire to preserve its room for maneuver . If public anger over U.S. tariffs were to boil over, it would become much harder for the party-state to offer concessions to the Americans.

There is another possibility, however, which is that at least some Chinese citizens are cheering on Trump’s hard-line approach, as the pro-democracy activist Chen Guangcheng recently suggested in The Washington Post: “It might seem counterintuitive to many Americans that people in China would call for more tariffs, as though welcoming economic damage at home. But most ordinary Chinese people don’t see it that way. They commonly believe tariffs will hurt the Communist Party far more than regular people, since it’s the party that manipulates trade to line its pockets and prop up the economy.”

Yet it is striking that Trump has done virtually nothing to encourage this line of thinking, despite the fact that doing so would surely redound to his, and more importantly, the world’s, benefit. To Trump, all that seems to matter is narrowing the bilateral trade deficit between the U.S. and China. In this regard, he is sure to be disappointed. Even if the bilateral trade deficit between the two countries were to shrink, overall trade balances are driven by how people in different countries choose to save and spend.