China seen posting steady fourth quarter GDP growth of 6.7 percent

Yet, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned, in what seemed a veiled offensive on the U.S., that pursuing protectionism is just like clocking oneself in a dark room.

“Trump advisers and cabinet-nominees have identified the US-China relationship as in need of adjustment to support the president-elect’s objective [of] a manufacturing renaissance”.

More recently, he has declared the One China policy, under which Washington agrees not to officially recognise Taiwan, is up for negotiation and a key member of his team suggested the U.S. and its allies should block access to islands Beijing has built in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.

On the face of it, China: it maintains a huge trade surplus with the US – roughly $30 billion per month in 2016, according to US Census data – and is in the midst of a tough economic transition that would become significantly tougher if exports plummeted.

Rhodes called the One-China policy “an agreement we reached with the biggest country in the world” and “the framework under which we do everything”.

But Beijing’s decision to double down on spending to meetits official growth target may have come at a high price, aspolicymakers will have their hands full this year trying todefuse financial risks created by an explosive growth in debt.

“With China America’s third largest and most rapidly growing export market, that’s hardly a trivial consideration for a growth-starved USA economy”, said Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale University and former non-executive chairman for Morgan Stanley in Asia.

-China trade war under the Trump presidency, founder of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Jack Ma said the poor plight of American economy was due to the costly wars waged by Washington and has nothing to do with trade ties with Beijing.

Newly-elected US President Donald Trump had earlier upset China by taking a congratulatory call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in December.

Taiwan, considered by Beijing as its territory since the two sides ended a civil war in 1949, has long hoped to have closer military relations with the United States, if not normalisation of such ties.

High-level visits from Washington to Taipei that picked up under previous Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou, bringing people as senior as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy, are forecast to sustain or grow. Niall Ferguson, a scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said turmoil in U.S.

It’s still a question if the Trump administration will live up to its 45% tariff imposition plans on goods from China, as many believe this is more of a trade negotiations tactic, but even a slight tariff on goods imported into the United States from emerging countries could start a domino effect of economic problems in the region.

“We’re going to do things that haven’t been done for our country for many, many decades”, he said. Credit growth in China has only recently slowed, and even then only marginally.

Trump’s team also needs time, like all of its predecessors, to figure out the complexity of China-U.S. relations.

And it signed off with a warning tone, saying that slapping punitive tariffs on his country’s largest trading partner and labelling China a “currency manipulator” would lead only to retaliation.

China is unsure how it should approach the new administration.