In mid-2018, just as Donald Trump was launching his first broadsides in a trade war against China, I arrived in Beijing on a semiregular trip to try to grasp how the country's political establishment saw the U.S. president.
That May, Trump had announced tens of billions of dollars of tariffs on Chinese goods. Soon after, with Beijing still scrambling to respond, the U.S. president announced a fresh set of import taxes.
