Peter Navarro: Why Trump's cabinet pick spells trouble with China

Donald Trump's latest cabinet appointment has caused concern that the US president-elect is gearing up for an economic "war" with Beijing.

Peter Navarro, the author of Death by China and The Coming China Wars, which call for a tougher stance on China, will lead a White House council on US trade policy.

Trump made no mention of his new recruit's hardline attitude, but said his work "laid out a path forward to restore our middle class" from "the harms inflicted by globalism".

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Navarro, a Harvard-educated academic, "is infamous in China watching circles for being a radical hawk" whose books paint the regime as a "despicable, parasitic, brutal, brass-knuckled, crass, callous, amoral, ruthless and totally totalitarian imperialist power", says The Guardian.

His portrayal of the country may be "reminiscent of the Yellow Peril stuff of a century ago", says Tim Worstall of Forbes, but more worryingly, "he believes things about trade that are simply not true".

The Financial Times quotes Dan Ikenson, the head of trade policy at Washington's Cato Institute, as saying Navarro's work presented a '"dangerous, misguided, zero-sum" view on the global economy.

Trump's attitude towards Beijing has raised eyebrows in Washington, where diplomats fear his blunt rhetoric and disregard for established protocol could further strain the two nations' already chilly relationship.

The president-elect has come under fire for taking a call from President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, undermining the US's longstanding agreement with China not to recognise the state.

Following the incident, China's state mouthpiece the Global Times said the businessman was "as ignorant as a child in terms of foreign policy", the South China Morning Post reports.

There are also "serious concerns" about Trump's apparent intention to jettison the One China policy that has been the glue of Sino-American relations, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said.

Trump's response has been to back his decision to accept Tsai's phone call in a Fox News interview during which he lashed out at China for everything from "taxing us heavy at the borders" to building a "fortress" in the South China Sea.

For good measure, he said Beijing "isn't helping us at all" with North Korea.

He also sent a defiant tweet following reports earlier this month that China had agreed to return a US underwater drone seized by a Chinese ship. "We should tell China that we don't want the drone they stole back," he wrote.

Trump's apparent inability to resist goading Beijing threatens to "turn the world's significant bilateral relationships into frighteningly spectacular reality TV", says Jiayang Fan in the New Yorker. "China's leaders are viscerally allergic to perceived bullying of any kind, especially at the hands of a Western superpower."

Vilifying China as "a thief of American jobs and a strongman archrival that must be vanquished" might go down well with his populist support base, she warns, but as foreign policy it is "dangerously misguided", she added.