China can help US with infrastructure plan

In the National Security Strategy report released in December, US President Donald Trump announced that the United States will launch a $1 trillion infrastructure building plan in 2018, which, if implemented, will be the largest US infrastructure expansion and upgrading campaign since the 1950s.

Considering China's more than 30 years of infrastructure construction experience and huge capacity and advanced standards, management and innovation technologies, its expanded cooperation with China in this area will serve both countries' common interests. Successful Sino-US infrastructure construction cooperation will set an exemplary model for China's cooperation with other countries; it will also produce spillover effects and consequently boost global interconnectivity.

Trump's domestic economic policy focuses on infrastructure, tax cuts, shrinking balance sheets and withdrawing the US from international agreements and organizations. However, such a policy combination faces some intrinsic contradictions and conflicts, given that expanded infrastructure construction and tax cuts are constrained by the upper debt ceiling while tax hikes increase the financing costs for fiscal expansion.