Ben Schreckinger is a reporter for Politico.

A decade after Wilbur Ross used a tariff on imported steel to weather Chinese competition and make his American mills profitable, he hung a picture taken in Beijing on his office wall. It shows a poster of three women in military uniforms marching proudly through Tiananmen Square, a platoon of People’s Liberation Army soldiers behind them. The picture followed a pair of Qing dynasty guard dog statues that Ross had stationed at the headquarters of his investment firm in New York and six sculptures of Coca-Cola bottles rendered in white-and-blue Ming porcelain displayed in the dining room at his waterfront villa in Palm Beach.

As Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Commerce Department, the billionaire investor will be tasked with implementing the president-elect’s promise to get tough on China. But since making his first fortune by going to war against Chinese steel in the early years of the 21st century, Ross has become a devoted Sinophile. In addition to assembling a formidable collection of Chinese art -- some 200 pieces in total, according to one profile -- he has partnered in shipping and energy ventures with Chinese state-owned firms, contributed to relief efforts after the country’s devastating 2008 earthquake and even compared the Chinese Communist Party’s five-year plans to the United States’ industrial policy.


As Ross recalibrates his stance and prepares to even the score with Beijing for, in Trump’s words, “raping this country,” his years-long love affair with the Middle Kingdom calls into question whether his heart will really be in it.

“I think the China-bashing is wildly overdone in this country,” said Ross in one CNBC interview, a statement that would have come across as a veiled swipe at Trump if he hadn’t made it in 2012. “The reality is that if something were to happen that cost China jobs, like if they upwardly revalued the currency a lot, those jobs aren’t going to come back to the U.S., they would go to Vietnam, they would go to Thailand, they would go to whatever country was the lowest cost, so it’s a fiction on both sides that those jobs will come back.”

Asked about outsourcing four years earlier by Profit Magazine, he said, “China has become the whipping boy in the U.S., just as Japan was some 15 years ago. This certainly is intellectually wrong.”

And in May, Ross, 79, explicitly departed from his future boss on a flashpoint in international trade, noting that China’s currency is in fact overvalued, not undervalued as Trump had been claiming on the campaign trail. “I disagree with my friend Mr. Trump in that particular regard,” he told Bloomberg.

But by September, Ross had begun toeing the Trumpist line, sounding more like “Death by China: Confronting the Dragon” author Peter Navarro -- Trump’s pick to lead the National Trade Council and Ross’s new collaborator on economic policy – and the president-elect himself.

In a campaign white paper Ross co-authored that month with Navarro, a Harvard-educated economist who has become one of China’s fiercest critics, he asserted that the renminbi was undervalued after all. “In a world of freely floating currencies, the U.S. dollar would weaken and the Chinese yuan would strengthen because the U.S. runs a large trade deficit with China and the rest of the world,” they wrote.

In the same paper, Ross and Navarro argued that China and the U.S. remained in direct competition for manufacturing jobs, writing, “When auto companies like GM or Ford build new factories in China or Mexico rather than in Michigan or Ohio, additional jobs are also lost throughout the economy.”

They also described Chinese trade practices in harsh terms, using the kind of language U.S. officials generally don’t. “China is both the biggest trade cheater in the world and that country with which the U.S. runs its largest trade deficit,” they wrote. “The elaborate web of unfair trade practices includes illegal export subsidies, the theft of intellectual property, the aforementioned currency manipulation, forced technology transfers and a widespread reliance upon both ‘sweat shop’ labor and pollution havens. The People’s Republic of China also engages in the massive dumping of select products such as aluminum and steel below cost.”

And they called China’s 2001 accession to the WTO “a critical catalyst for America’s slow growth plunge,” citing research that argued the move “raised the unemployment rate, depressed wages and the labor participation rate, and reduced the lifetime income of workers in American manufacturing most exposed to the shock.”

Ross’s views on the Trans-Pacific Partnership have also changed since he entered Trump’s orbit.

In May of 2015, he was among the signatories of a letter, published by the Huffington Post, from business leaders to New York’s congressional leaders in support of the deal. “Trade experts and economists agree that the TPP would be a catalyst for creating new jobs in the United States, attracting more foreign investment to this country, and benefitting American workers in a broad range of industries,” the letter read.

By Nov. 30, the day Trump announced Ross as his pick for Commerce, Ross had changed his tune. He appeared on CNBC and called the TPP “horrible,” saying it was too soft on China. He cited the deal’s rules of origination, which govern the amount of parts and raw materials that can come from countries that have not signed on to the deal, for being too lenient. “In automotive, a majority of a car could come from outside TPP, namely could come from China, and still get all the benefits of TPP,” he complained.

Neither the Trump transition nor Ross’s office responded to questions about why his views had evolved over the years from a mix of muted praise and nuanced criticism to strident China-bashing. And to be sure, Ross has long advocated tools like short-term tariffs and a value added tax that would apply to imports from China and elsewhere. But his positions have been nothing like those of Navarro, one of America’s most prominent China hawks. And Ross’s reversals come after a lengthy period of warming to, then embracing, the country.

After more than two decades as a bankruptcy specialist at Rothschild and Co. — where he helped a flailing Trump salvage his personal finances and Atlantic City casino empire in the 1990s — Ross struck out on his own, launching a distressed asset fund on April Fool’s day 2000.

After consulting with contacts in Washington, Ross correctly predicted that George W. Bush would levy a temporary tariff on steel, which lasted from 2002 to 2003, long enough for the American mills purchased by Ross’s International Steel Group to make themselves competitive with Chinese importers.

From there, Ross concluded that capitalizing on China’s system could be just as good as competing with it. He organized International Textile Group, an apparel manufacturer, to exploit China’s entry into the WTO, opening a joint venture there in 2005.

Gary Hufbauer, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the move was one of many that have made it hard to find a consistent pattern on trade among Trump’s economic team. “It’s just the tip of the iceberg of contradictions between the campaign rhetoric of candidate Trump and the actions of his key advisers like Wilbur Ross and his own investments abroad,” he said. “We’re talking about 180-degree opposition.”

While Ross was making a fortune in distressed assets, he was investing the profits in more rarefied ones, earning a reputation as a leading collector of fine art.

At first, that reputation rested on his holdings from Western artists, like the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte -- famed for mind-bending works like his 1929 painting of a tobacco pipe floating above the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

“In Belgium there’s a Magritte museum that has a pretty good collection of Magrittes but not as good as Wilbur Ross’s apartment,” recalled Howard Gutman, who served as President Barack Obama’s first ambassador to Belgium and dined at Ross’s New York home in late 2009 around the opening of a Magritte exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Following the dinner, Gutman, who supports Ross’s nomination to Commerce, held several follow-up discussions with Ross about potential energy ventures in Europe.

But nothing came of the talks. By that time, Ross’s art and business interests were both drifting increasingly to the East. During his travels to China for his textile business, Ross had acquired a taste for Chinese artists, including the dissident photographer Liu Bolin and the Muslim sculptor Zhang Hongtu, drawn in by their efforts to synthesize Eastern traditions with the modern West. “It's a very interesting experimental form of art," Ross told Forbes in 2013. "It tries to combine the heritages of two very diverse cultures."

In 2007, when art collector and publisher Larry Warsh began assembling a group of investors to buy up Chinese art, he met with Ross at the billionaire’s Midtown office, and was surprised to learn that Ross was already a knowledgeable collector. Warsh, the editor of “Weiwei-isms,” a collection of quotes from the artist Ai Weiwei, said he and Ross discussed their shared expectation that the value of Chinese art would explode as Chinese nationals began buying in a market then dominated by Western patrons.

In their discussion of contemporary Chinese calligraphers and photographers — many of whom have since surged to stateside prominence and had their work displayed at the Getty, the MoMa and the Met — Warsh said Ross stuck out from the other Western businessmen he was meeting. “Other people cared about money,” Warsh said. “He was about the essence of the culture.”

Warsh said that such insights into Chinese culture would give Ross an edge in other dealings in the country. “Nonfinancial cultural exchange sets an amazing foundation for economic exchange. That’s something important to have when you’re dealing with China today.”

That cultural exchange is present not only in the works that hang on Ross’s walls, but in some of the walls themselves. When Ross and his third wife Hillary were refurbishing their property in Southampton a few years back and looking to shade its pool house from the sun, the couple’s longtime designer, Mario Buatta, suggested constructing a pagoda-like structure over it. The Rosses jumped at the idea. “They happened to like Chinese so it worked out very well,” Buatta said.

The Chinese happen to like Ross back, and their government enterprises have made him a business partner in recent years. In 2008, he entered into a joint venture with the state-owned China Huaneng Group, led by a son of former Chinese premier Li Peng. At the time Ross – who had taken heat in 2006 when 12 workers died at a coal mine in West Virginia weeks after he purchased it -- said the venture would finance clean coal, among other projects. He also contributed to recovery efforts in the wake of the deadly earthquake that year Sichuan province as a co-chair of the China Relief Fund. Since then, Ross has also gone into business with China Investment Corp, a state-owned sovereign wealth fund that chipped in $500 million alongside his investment in Greenwich, Connecticut-based Diamond S Shipping.

Along the way, Ross, who has said he would divest from assets that Trump deemed to present conflicts of interest, has acquired a taste for the Chinese way of doing business.

In a 2010 Charlie Rose interview, Ross, a former Democrat, gushed over the Chinese government’s muscular interventions in the nation’s economy, a view that roughly aligns with Trump’s approach but amounts to apostasy against conservative free-market orthodoxy. Ross specifically expressed his admiration for China’s ability to quickly jumpstart a green energy industry by forcing utilities to prioritize renewable power and pay a premium for it. “Now that’s how you have an industrial policy,” he said, while bemoaning the United States’ more laissez-faire approach. “We don’t even do easy things,” he lamented.

In a portion of the interview that might give his friend David Koch a heart attack, Ross went on to praise China’s system of rigid, socialist-style economic planning. “They really make a five-year plan and they really hold themselves to it,” he said. “They really believe in it. And if you’re thinking in terms of five years rather than the next 10 minutes you have a different thinking process.”

In 2013, Ross joined the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution, and in recent summers has hosted Brookings policy salons at the Hamptons house featuring the likes of Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, former ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, journalist David Wessel and Harvard Kennedy School Dean Doug Elmendorf.

Unlike Trump, who rarely reads anything but the briefest of policy briefings, Ross immersed himself in the think tank’s economic research, according to Brookings president Strobe Talbott.

“To quite an admirable degree he would read carefully particularly reports and analysis that came out of our economic studies program,” Talbott recalled, saying Ross would often call up scholars to discuss and debate their latest findings.

His dual bona fides as a tycoon and consumer of policy papers could give Ross the cachet to temper the more aggressive impulses of both Navarro and Trump.

“He will be a positive influence on the U.S.-China relationship,” wrote former Goldman Sachs President John Thornton, a friend of Ross’s, funder of Brookings’ China center and recipient of China’s Friendship Award, the highest honor the country bestows on non-citizens, in an email. “He is a pragmatist, not an ideologue.”

Newsmax founder Chris Ruddy, who has long known both Ross and Trump from Palm Beach social circles, sounded a similar note.

“My experience with Wilbur is that he doesn’t approach things on an ideological basis,” he said. “He’s a very practical thinker. Donald likes people who are practical and who are aggressive, who go in and get the job done.”

“He’s a businessman. He’s done business in China,” Hufbauer said of Ross. “He could be a moderating force.”

Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.

