A friend who lives in China and who's a keen observer of U.S. politics has an interesting theory.
He says Joe Biden's son runs a private equity firm, and the Chinese government invested $1 billion+ dollars in it, as a way of currying favor from Biden. He believes the Chinese want to see Biden win the 2020 election, like the Russians wanted to see Trump win in 2016.
However, it's too early for them to start messing with Trump's chances. If Biden doesn't get the Democratic nomination, the Chinese may not be much better off even though Trump loses. Sanders, Warren and some of the other Democratic candidates are just as anti-China as Trump. So my friend expects the Chinese to tread water for the time being. If they can get a deal that's reasonable for China and doesn't cause them to lose face, they may do that.
If Trump's continuing to be difficult come 2020 and if Biden looks like a shoo in for the Democratic nomination, then watch for them to potentially get nasty. He likens China to a giant who's being pelted with pebbles. He doesn't think it's worth responding all out at first. But at some point he's had enough and goes postal. He believes Xi has a strong political motivation to not being seen kowtowing to the Americans. If he looks weak he loses, more so than if a trade war cuts a point or two off GDP. And he notes that the Chinese are very nationalistic and able to put up with a lot more hardship than Americans. In the past, when the Chinese government was pissed off at the Japanese or Koreans over security matters, they'd get the population riled up, and the next thing you know there are riots and Japanese and Korean businesses are torched. So potentially expect to see the same with U.S. companies. They'll do to U.S. businesses what we're doing to Huawei, like for example shut GM and Apple out of China. They'll throw Americans in jail, to get back at us for going after Huawei's Chief Financial Officer (and daughter of its founder), who's under arrest in Canada and awaiting possible deportation to the USA. And they'll try to shut rare earth elements out of products destined for America, which would have bad repercussions for our technology industry and the military.
All this may throw the USA into a recession around the summer or fall of 2020, thus nuking Trump's re-election chances and putting Biden into the presidency.
This is all interesting, but perhaps a little far fetched. A more likely scenario is that Trump doesn't back off on the trade war so that the economy suffers and Biden doesn't need any help from China:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ade-war-builds
Morgan Stanley Sees Recession Within a Year If Trade War Gets Any Worse
A recession could begin in as soon as nine months if President Donald Trump pushes to impose 25% tariffs on an additional $300 billion of Chinese exports and China retaliates with its own countermeasures, according to Chetan Ahya, chief economist and global head of economics at Morgan Stanley.