China media warns ‘rookie’ Trump after tweets

DONALD Trump is a “diplomatic rookie” who must learn not to cross Beijing on issues like trade and Taiwan, Chinese state media said yesterday, warning America could pay for his naivety.

Trump’s protocol-shattering call with Taiwan’s president and a subsequent Twitter tirade against Beijing’s policies could risk upending the delicate balance between the world’s two largest economies, major media outlets said.

“Provoking friction and messing up China-US relations won’t help ‘make America great again’”, said a front-page opinion piece in the overseas edition of Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily. The nationalist Global Times newspaper’s Chinese edition also ran a page-one story on Trump’s “inability to keep his mouth shut”, damning his “provocation and falsehoods”.

Trump fired off two tweets on Sunday blasting China for devaluing its currency, taxing US imports, and building military installations in the South China Sea.

The comments followed criticism of Trump in US and Chinese media for taking a congratulatory phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, a move that flew in the face of nearly 40 years of diplomatic protocol and raised questions about whether the president-elect intends to pursue a hard line against Beijing.

Official reaction from Beijing has been muted, but China often uses state media to telegraph its positions, employing rhetoric beyond the diplomatic pale.

The Global Times’s English-language edition filled its opinion pages with editorials slamming the president-elect. Noting that Sino-US relations had reached a delicate equilibrium thanks to years of careful management, an editorial in the paper warned that Trump “can make a lot of noise but that does not exempt him from the rules of the major power game”, adding that he “doesn’t have sufficient resources” to be provocative with China.

“Trump’s China-bashing tweet is just a cover for his real intent, which is to treat China as a fat lamb and cut a piece of meat off it,” it said. “He is trying to pillage other countries for US prosperity,” it warned, but instead he will unwittingly “smash the current world economic order” of which the US is the “biggest beneficiary”.

A companion commentary warned that Trump “will in time learn not to cross China”, threatening “a fierce competition” with Beijing if the US increases arm sales to Taiwan.