Is a thaw coming in the U.S.-China trade war?

Internal U.S. divisions and Chinese strategic caution shape the current stalemate

Welcome back to What’s Happening in China, your weekly China brief.

As with much of Trump 2.0’s foreign policy, U.S.-PRC relations remain tense, but are we beginning to see the first signs of a thaw in the trade war?

On Friday, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Commerce said that “China is currently evaluating” the U.S.’s repeated expression of willingness to negotiate on tariffs. So how should the PRC go about it? The Wall Street Journal’s Lingling Wei reported that Beijing “has been inquiring about what the Trump team wants China to do when it comes to the chemical ingredients used to make fentanyl.” That may be Beijing’s olive branch.

Still, does the Trump administration even know what it wants? As Mary Gallagher, a global affairs professor at the University of Notre Dame, points out in a recent piece, this administration’s erratic trade strategy likely reflects internal tensions between “trade hawks and long-time China threat mongers, such as Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, on one s…