Donald Trump frequently cited what he called China's "rape" of the U.S. economy during his 2016 campaign rallies, and as president put half of what China sells to the U.S. under tariffs during his second year in office. But the economic battle between the two largest economies in the world didn’t start with Trump and won’t end with him. How and why have U.S.-China relations sunk so low? And where are they headed? In Superpower Showdown, _Wall Street Journal_ reporters Bob Davis and Lingling Wei trace the route of the trade war from the early 1990s to the January 2020 signing of the phase one deal that signaled a temporary halt to economic hostilities.
Bob Davis is a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal who covers economic issues out of the Washington D.C. bureau, especially those that will play out in the presidential campaign. He was part of a team of Journal reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for coverage of the Asian and Russian financial crisis.
Lingling Wei is an award-winning journalist in _The Wall Street Journal_’s Beijing bureau. Hailing from a farm province in eastern China, she came of age as a journalist in New York and then returned to China in early 2011 to report on changes in her homeland. She focuses on the intersection of Chinese politics and the economy.