Spared for now, a wary Beijing waits

China might have appeared to have been spared in the first few hours of Mr Trump’s second term. Absent among the flurry of executive orders the new President signed on his first day in office were the steep tariffs he had earlier promised to slap on the world’s second-largest economy. “It is the opening shot, and it is Trump sending the signal that he is holding back for now while he thinks about what to do with some of the issues he is unhappy about,” said Assoc Prof Hoo Tiang Boon, a US-China relations expert at NTU. “He wants to create a window for negotiation.”

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