Yesterday, the Treasury department in its six-monthly report to the Congress placed China, Germany, Japan, Korea, Switzerland and Taiwan in the "monitoring list" of countries that needed close attention for their currency practices.
"Taiwan has a track record of asymmetric foreign-exchange interventions, highlighting the urgency of the authorities limiting foreign-exchange intervention only to circumstances of disorderly exchange-market conditions and making foreign-exchange operations more transparent", the report said.
"I think you see China playing a much more active role with respect to North Korea both politically and economically, that they can continue to apply pressure to achieve results", he said.
It may be that Trump, the businessman-turned-world leader, is discovering China's transactional approach to foreign relations is better suited to achieving his own goals.
In the Trump campaign's "contract" with American voters he promised, "I will direct the secretary of the treasury to label China a currency manipulator" in the first 100 days of his presidency.
The report shows the Trump administration is taking an approach to foreign exchange based on data rather than politics, said Nathan Sheets, a former U.S. Treasury under secretary for global affairs during the Obama administration.
A currency manipulator designation is largely symbolic and starts negotiations between the U.S. and any country determined to be manipulating its exchange rate. Trump said in a tweet early Sunday to his 28 million followers.
Foreign exchange experts told Reuters last week that a manipulator label was unlikely for Beijing.
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It is the third time that Taiwan has been on the list in the twice-yearly report since the United States began including it in April previous year.
In fact, in recent years the Chinese government has intervened to prop up the currency, economists say.
Previous administrations have used three factors to determine if a country is a currency manipulator - a trade surplus with the US of more than $20 billion; a current-account surplus totaling more than 3% of its gross domestic product; and repeatedly devaluing its currency by buying foreign assets that equals to 2% of output a year.
South Korea met only two out of three criteria to become a currency manipulator - trade surplus, current account surplus and market intervention.
Zhou said plans for the United States and China to spend 100 days looking for ways to tackle the trade imbalance were "just a beginning" and could result in China lifting a ban on American beef and opening up its financial market in the short term. The other countries all meet two criteria on the list.
Trump did say he thought the dollar was "getting too strong" - a comment that sent the US currency falling, though it subsequently rebounded.
"This isn't the report that Donald Trump had in mind on November 8", said Sheets, who is now with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
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