China may have a winning strategy for any trade war with the U.S.: simply waiting it out.

Beijing’s plan of action following this week's trade talks with the U.S. is likely to be to take advantage of divergent opinions and mixed messages within the Trump administration, longtime China observers and trade experts say. China hopes that by playing the long game against the U.S., it will be able to gain better concessions on tariffs and trade policies in the future.


Over two days of trade meetings in China that ended Friday, Chinese officials stood firm against demands from some of President Donald Trump’s top economic advisers and laid out strict requests of their own. The result was that the U.S. delegation headed home having made little progress on intractable issues — an outcome that may play right into China’s interests.

“The Chinese are just unbelievably great at playing rope-a-dope,” said Rob Atkinson, the president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. “Everything they’re going to do is going to be a stall tactic, because the more they can stall, they can string us along.”

The U.S., for its part, is demanding stringent action by the Chinese government to curb what it sees as abuses and undercutting of fair trade principles.

Top administration officials laid out insistent demands calling on China to slash its trade surplus with the United States by more than half. They also pushed Beijing to stop all state subsidization of advanced manufacturing industries — steep asks that China is likely to reject outright.

Beijing, in turn, asked Washington to treat it like a market-driven economy and to drop all punitive measures aimed at combating China’s intellectual property practices. Already, the U.S. has slapped tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum, and officials are threatening tariffs on as much as $150 billion in exports over IP and technology issues.

The tone from the outset of the negotiations does not augur well for a quick resolution, and China’s state-run Xinhua media outlet acknowledged “considerable differences” remaining and called for “continued hard work” from both parties. With neither side yet willing to budge on any major issues, the most significant accomplishment so far is that the two countries have agreed to keep talking.

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Some hope continued dialogue will help avert a possible trade war between the two economic giants — but the concern is that it could also lead simply to prolonged discussions and little action, exactly as China intended.

“The real question,” Atkinson said, “is whether the Trump team is savvy enough to just call out the B.S. and say, ‘Stop right now.’”

The challenge for the Trump administration is to decide whether to continue working cordially with the Chinese to try to strike a deal or whether, in the interim before a second round of talks, to proceed with its threatened actions to impose tariffs on up to $150 billion on Chinese goods or somehow restrict the country’s investment in sectors of the U.S. economy.

Doing so could dash any goodwill remaining between the countries, but refraining could also make the administration look like it was backing down from its proposed course of action without having notched anything concrete from the Chinese in return.

A handful of business groups had urged the administration officials before their trip to focus on setting firm deadlines with the Chinese to make changes — while outlining concrete punishments they would face if they did not adhere to them.

The best way forward would be to set “measurable, commercially meaningful guidelines with timelines of implementation,” said Erin Ennis, senior vice president of the U.S.-China Business Council.

The Business Roundtable offered similar guidance, adding: “Negotiations that focus on temporarily reducing the trade deficit would make this a wasted effort.”

But as meetings wrapped up Friday evening and members of the delegation — which also included U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro — headed home, there were no indications that such a timeline had been nailed down. There was also no sign that there was a second meeting scheduled.

In a four-paragraph statement released by the White House, the administration said there was consensus that the U.S.-China relationship needs “immediate attention,” but it made no mention of the way forward except to say that the delegation was returning home “to brief the president and seek his decision on next steps.”

Chinese officials had already begun to float the idea before this week’s meetings that they would travel to Washington around the end of this month for further talks, but there was no official word on whether, or when, that would take place.

The talks could stretch for many months or even years, given how much trade is at stake. The U.S. imports more goods from China than anywhere else, and changing those policies will not happen over a few high-level chats.

In the meantime, savvy Chinese negotiators could persuade Trump to delay ratcheting up the tension until after he meets with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, for example.

Another stalling tactic is that Beijing officials could push him to wait until after November’s midterm elections by convincing Trump that he doesn’t want to disrupt his relationship with one of the U.S.’ largest trading partners just before voters go to the polls.

Administration officials have “got to focus if they want to match the rhetoric of the president, and that means they probably have to identify a couple of high-value targets that they’re interested in negotiating specifics on,” said one source who has advised Lighthizer and Navarro on China trade issues.

The process could hark back to the 1980s, when the U.S. countered the rise of Japan through various agreements — some stemming from the threat of the same Section 301 law being used now against China. That included an agreement on semiconductors in which Japan guaranteed access for U.S. chip-makers, although the source was quick to note that Japan in the 1980s pales in comparison to China today.

“Almost every approach with China over the years has been asking them to play by the rules and to do better without any metric or in some ways specifics about what success would look like,” the source said. “I think they have to go back to that approach of having specific yardsticks by which you can measure whether or what kind of changes are occurring in the Chinese market.”

Trump, for his part, offered his standard praise for Chinese President Xi Jinping and noted that the U.S. was being “so nice” to China. Despite his tough talk on trade, Trump has been publicly chummy with Xi, particularly ahead of his upcoming summit with Kim.

But Trump pledged once again Friday that the administration would take action to rebalance the trading relationship.

“We will be doing something, one way or the other, with respect to what's happening in China,” he told reporters. “We have to bring fairness into trade between the U.S. and China. And we'll do it.”

Adam Behsudi contributed to this report.