It’s not normal to view documentaries about international trade negotiations as light relief, but we are where we are. Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China is a two-parter produced by film-maker Norma Percy, whose signature style – on series including The Iraq War, Putin vs the West and Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil – is to use first-hand testimonies to revisit diplomatic flashpoints from a decade or so ago: sufficiently soon after the events for everyone who was there to still be alive, but late enough for them to no longer be in the same job and now be willing to gossip.
Percy’s latest opens with the arrival of Chinese president Xi Jinping at the Davos forum in 2017. On his debut appearance at the event, Xi stimulates delegates with a speech positioning himself as a champion of free trade, offering to work with other countries for mutual economic benefit. What might historically have been an odd tack for China’s leader is not that surprising to the bankers, financiers and politicians in the room, who know Xi is pre-empting the inauguration, a few days later, of Donald Trump as US president.
The US and China are about to engage in a trade war, or at least a series of skirmishes, fuelled by Trump and his acolytes’ resentment of Chinese economic strength and its supposedly nefarious influence on US commerce. Trump has hinted as much on the campaign trail: “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing. It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world!”
As soon as this clip plays, Clash of the Superpowers is in different territory to its predecessors. It’s a Donald Trump show. Anything involving Trump becomes a discussion about Trump, and any discussion about Trump becomes a game where everyone else has the hopeless task of second-guessing his caprices and trying to gauge his motivations, all of which are likely to turn out worse than anyone could bring themselves to believe. Percy’s films are usually nuanced dramas of manners, with bigwigs from different countries exploiting minor personal weaknesses to achieve big results; Trump staggers in and vomits all over that.
Yet, this is Trump in his first term, a leader who by 2026 standards is harmless and quaint. The end of the world is never nigh. It’s less than 10 years ago, but feels so much longer.
Interviewees represent both sides of the divide among Trump’s advisers: those of the old school who thought normal business could be done with China and tariffs would be an act of self-harm, and those who thought this was unforgivably naive and the alternative to tariffs was meek surrender. The debate rolls on as Trump and Xi take turns to invite each other over for canapes: Trump ignores the normal protocols by hosting Xi at Mar-a-Lago, while Xi breaks with tradition by allowing Trump to tour the Forbidden City. Nobody knows what Trump will do next. National security adviser HR McMaster describes him as “reflexively contrarian” – a leader who cannot be briefed in the normal way, because a consensus among his advisers that he mustn’t say a certain thing all but guarantees that he’ll say it.
But a startlingly direct speech by Trump in Beijing, opining that he doesn’t blame China for exploiting the US to benefit Chinese citizens, doesn’t faze his opposite number; neither does the sudden imposition of tariffs on Chinese imports to the US. Yes, Xi puts on a naval display in the South China Sea as a warning not to mess with him, but it’s a move fuelled by calm rationality. When Trump and Xi meet again at the G20 in Buenos Aires in 2018 to negotiate a way out of the tariff hole, Xi remains cool, but Trump’s guys are floundering behind the scenes, realising they’ve brought an orangutan to a dressage competition. “It was unnerving,” remembers another national security adviser, John Bolton, “to watch Xi, in a very systematic, thorough way, advance what were clearly his well thought-out objectives, and to watch Trump wing it.”
The programme cuts straight from this quote to footage of Trump, in Buenos Aires, blathering: “The relationship is very special, the relationship that I have with President Xi. I think that is going to be a very primary reason why we’ll probably end up getting something ... ” It’s a moment of pure comedy, from an era when global politics was still just about a suitable subject for wry, poised TV documentaries. Back then, Donald Trump was almost funny.
Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now
