President Trump signs the Hong Kong Autonomy Act on July 14, 2020, and issues an executive order terminating Fulbright exchange programs to China and Hong Kong. Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour
CLAREMONT, CALIFORNIA — “Decoupling” is central to the geopolitical duel between the United States and China. Conceived and promoted by hawks in U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, this strategy has now become America’s principal tool to weaken Chinese power.
The first act of decoupling — the Sino-American trade war that began in 2018 — has substantially reduced bilateral trade. A similar process is now in full swing in the technology sector, with the U.S. pursuing an unrelenting campaign against Chinese tech giants such as Huawei and ByteDance (the owner of the popular video app TikTok). With the Trump administration threatening to have Chinese firms delisted from U.S. stock exchanges if they fail to give U.S. auditors access to their audit records in China, financial decoupling has begun as well.
Although it remains to be seen whether economic decoupling will succeed in containing China, the strategic logic at leas
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