When Donald Trump declared on Monday that he would impose punitive tariffs on about half of all Chinese exports to the US, it was a moment that President Xi Jinping had long believed would never come.
For two years after Mr Trump emerged as a force to be reckoned in the 2016 US presidential campaign, Mr Xi and his lieutenants clung to precedent for comfort. While American presidential candidates routinely bashed China on the campaign trail, once in the White House they played down differences with their geopolitical rival.
As Mr Xi said at his first meeting with Mr Trump in the spring of 2017: “We have a thousand reasons to get US-China relations right, and not one reason to spoil them.”
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