The Trump administration has envisioned “a big, beautiful rebalancing” between the world’s two largest economies, a world in which the US revives its manufacturing sector and China stokes its domestic consumption to engineer a dramatic reduction in American trade deficits and mirror-image Chinese surpluses.
China’s Communist Party has other ideas. Its latest five-year economic plan shows that Donald Trump’s dream is actually a fantasy, at least on Beijing’s side anyway. Rather than prioritizing an expansion in household demand, the party has doubled down on its production-led development model, elevating the erection of a “modernized industrial system” to the No. 1 priority, up from No. 2 in the previous plan. That’s according to an outline of the plan released on Thursday.