China prefers to deal with the devil it knows. Beijing was fully prepared to deal with a President Hillary Clinton but, like the rest of us, the country’s foreign policy establishment is in the dark about what follows the election of Donald Trump. This creates genuine uncertainty in Beijing.
Chinese policy analysts are now working overtime to map out the future of Sino-American relations. Broadly, there are three overlapping schools of thought. China’s response to Mr Trump will be shaped by whichever prevails. Either way, it will be brutally pragmatic and not remotely ideological.
The first of these schools might simply be called the “instability” school. China has a deeply conservative approach to international policy. It does not like unpredictability. With Mr Trump, it has ended up with strategic unpredictability at scale.