Barely three months into his second term as president, Donald Trump has already sent out a series of mixed messages about his tariff policy. But there’s one consistent theme running through it all: Trump is determined to recast the economic relationship of the United States with China.

To learn more about how China’s rulers perceive the agenda of the Trump administration and what they are going to do in response, we spoke to Ho-fung Hung, a professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins and the author of books such as The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World and City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule. His next work, The China Question: Eight Centuries of Fantasy and Fear, will be published this November.