Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) and US President Donald Trump at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 9, 2017.

By sharply accelerating in recent months its trade adjustment with the U.S., China has finally done what it should have initiated more than two years ago.

Beijing is on the way to seriously dismantling Washington's economic and political leverage over China's economy. During 11 months of last year, China stepped up the rate of decline of its trade surplus with the U.S. to 16.2%.

Feverish sinologists would call that "decoupling" — a misnomer for China's belated exit from a position of an excessive and unsustainable trade surplus with the U.S.

Those sinologists don't seem to notice that China is getting out of that self-imposed structural trap by aggressively slashing its U.S. purchases at an annual rate of 12% between January and November of last year.

Instead of worrying about "decoupling," advocates of friendly U.S.-China ties should remind Beijing that it should be doing exactly the opposite — by drastically stepping up imports of American goods and services. If the Chinese did that, they would not have to abandon their U.S. markets by cutting exports at an annual rate of 15.2%, as they did for nearly all of last year.

So, the question is: Who is in a hurry to "decouple?"

Looking at trade flows and China's declining holdings of U.S. debt, the Chinese have apparently concluded that a rapid narrowing of U.S. exposure was a matter of their national interest.

That conclusion has come after years of pleading for a "win-win cooperation," while Washington kept trying to contain China's growing global economic and political influence. Instead of cooperation, the U.S. defined its relationship with China as a strategic competition with a country seeking to destroy the Western (i.e., American) world order.

Cooperation made sense for China because it meant an open access to U.S. markets and technology transfers. The U.S., however, finally began to see things differently as it woke up from its evanescing dream that an increasingly prosperous China would shake off its communist rule and join the U.S.-led Western community.

What followed was a radical U.S. policy change Beijing apparently did not expect. China's huge, and growing, American trade surpluses became an imminent strategic danger that had to be fought by tariffs, sanctions and strict limits to Chinese investments in the U.S. economy.