Analysts believe former Trump strategist is using visit to send signals to Beijing ahead of president’s visit in mid-November

A “very aggressive” Donald Trump will jet into China in November seeking to thrash out a revolutionised relationship that could avert a trade war between the world’s top two economies, Steve Bannon has said.



“I believe we can avoid a trade war, which is detrimental to both countries,” the US president’s controversial former chief strategist told Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post during a visit to the former British colony. “We have to somehow reach an agreement.”

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On the eve of his trip to the Asian financial hub, where he gave a keynote speech at an investors’ forum thrown by a Hong Kong brokerage with close ties to Beijing, Bannon painted a wretched picture of US-China relations.

“A hundred years from now, this is what they’ll remember: what we did to confront China on its rise to world domination,” the 63-year-old Breitbart News chairman told the New York Times, comparing China to pre-Nazi Germany. “China right now is Germany in 1930,” he warned. “It’s on the cusp. It could go one way or the other.”

But on Tuesday Bannon struck a softer note, declaring that he had “never been an anti-China guy”. “The conflict [between China and the US] is not preordained. It can be avoided if we work together,” he told the South China Morning Post.

Bannon also heaped praise on China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, who is about to celebrate five years in power at a major Communist party congress in Beijing. “I don’t think there’s a world leader that President Trump respects more than the president of China,” he told investors, according to Bloomberg, pointing to “a great affinity between our two countries”.



“Xi is very impressive,” Bannon added in his interview with the South China Morning Post. “He really understands what’s in the best interests of his people … He is very smart, very tough but fair. He is direct and to the point – just like President Trump. That is why they like each other so much.”

In a second interview, Bannon said he believed the two leaders would be able to strike a deal: “You have a very aggressive president [Trump]. But I think they’ll reach some sort of accommodation,” he told Daily Mail Online.

Orville Schell, the head of the centre on US-China relations at New York’s Asia Society, said Bannon – though no longer the president’s chief strategist – appeared to be acting as “Trump’s stalking horse”, using the Hong Kong trip to send signals to China’s leaders ahead of Trump’s anticipated visit there in mid-November.

Schell said that having failed to pass any significant legislation at home or secure a breakthrough on North Korea, Trump was now “rather urgently in need of a deal”. “Here is a man who has proclaimed himself to be the deal-maker of all deal-makers and he’s got no deals made … He’s got nothing, literally nothing to show. One supreme court judge.”

Determined to change that, Schell predicted Trump would come to China seeking a “meeting of the minds” with Xi; “a monumental sort of arrangement” between the two powers was even on the cards that might see the Chinese make concessions on North Korea and the US give ground on issues such as the South China Sea and trade. “It’s not extremely likely but it is not unthinkable,” Schell said.

Bannon certainly appeared to be teeing up such a deal in Hong Kong. According to the South China Morning Post, he suggested a stable trade relationship between Washington and Beijing could help the two sides manage their differences over “other potential conflict points such as North Korea and the South China Sea”. “This is different from the cold war. We are clearly competitors but we can work out the issues between us,” he said.

Those comments, which one commentator called “a love letter to authoritarianism”, stood in stark contrast to Bannon’s previous declarations on China.

“To me the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that,” Bannon told the liberal American Prospect magazine last month on the eve of his removal from the White House.



Last year Bannon said he had “no doubt” that within the next decade the US and China would go to war in the South China Sea.



Schell said Bannon’s mixed messages on China – combative one day, conciliatory the next – were very much in line with Trump’s modus operandi. “In extremis, you play both sides of the equation which enables you to go either way. You can either turn Xi into Hitler or he is your next big best friend.

“That is what Bannon is starting to cue up: a recognition that Trump is transactional. That he’d like to make a deal or he could be enemies.”

The message to China’s president was unmissable: “Take your pick.”