US looking inward under Trump made development space for China, expert says

China should build on its “most important” strategic assets of domestic stability and progress to navigate US President Donald Trump’s shattering of global norms, a Washington watcher at a Chinese think tank says.Ni Feng, a researcher and former director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of American Studies, said the Trump administration’s “disruptive” overhaul of US diplomacy was sending the international system into a “more volatile and uncertain” phase.This could leave Beijing facing an increasingly “complex and volatile” outside world, he warned during an event on January 15 organised by the Shanghai Development Research Foundation (SDRF), a non-profit advisory body.FULL EVENT: Donald Trump’s ‘board of peace’ charter announcementFULL EVENT: Donald Trump’s ‘board of peace’ charter announcement“The US strategic retrenchment and looking inward have created objective conditions for China to strive for development space,” Ni said, according to an excerpt of his speech published by the SDRF on its social media channel on Monday.“The US … more tending to be utilitarian and restless, will also increase external uncertainty and risks,” he told the event.“In the face of a United States that is ‘more restless, inward-looking and utilitarian’, the key for China is not to react passively to [America’s] policy changes but to enhance the certainty of [our] own development.”His comments come amid growing debate and anxieties across the globe over how the world order will be affected by Trump’s “America first” agenda – as outlined in his administration’s National Security Strategy released last month and national defence strategy released on Friday.Such concerns – recently stoked by Trump’s talk of taking over Greenland and the dramatic US abduction of Venezuela’s former leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife – were laid bare by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney last week.