On a three-day visit to China, the Democratic senator and potential 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren said Donald Trump’s efforts to “take the legs out from underneath our diplomatic corps” had been a “terrible mistake”.

Warren discussed trade and North Korea with senior Chinese officials including Liu He, vice-premier for economic policy, Yang Jiechi, a top diplomat, and the minister of defense, Wei Fenghe.

Warren, who has made stops in Japan and South Korea, said US allies were having trouble understanding Trump’s “chaotic” foreign policy.

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Trump exchanged insults and veiled threats of war over Pyonyang’s tests of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, before the US leader made the surprising announcement last month that he was prepared to meet Kim.

Warren said success would be getting a commitment to discuss verifiable steps to reduce North Korea’s nuclear threat, which would require careful negotiations from a state department whose role has been vastly diminished under Trump. Several high-profile diplomatic posts are unoccupied.

Trump fired the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, last month and has nominated the CIA director, Mike Pompeo, to replace him.

On trade, Warren told reporters in Beijing that US policy toward China has been misdirected for decades and policymakers are now recalibrating ties.



Trump is preparing to implement more than $50bn in tariffs on Chinese goods, meant as punishment for allegations that Beijing has systematically misappropriated American intellectual property.

Warren has said US trade policy needs a rethink and that she is not afraid of tariffs. After years of mistakenly assuming economic engagement would lead to a more open China, she said, the US was waking up to Chinese demands for US companies to give up their knowhow in exchange for access to its market.

“The whole policy was misdirected,” Warren said. “We told ourselves a happy face story that never fit with the facts. Now US policymakers are starting to look more aggressively at pushing China to open up the markets without demanding a hostage price of access to US technology.”

Warren said she told Chinese officials that the US cannot support a more integrated economic system with China if it “fails to respect basic human rights”.

China’s ruling Communist party has tightened controls on society since President Xi Jinping assumed power, from online censorship to a crackdown on activists and non-governmental organisations. Chinese officials routinely deny accusations of rights abuses.