President Donald Trump just ignited a direct showdown with the one nation that might be able to beat the United States in a trade war.
Trump\u2019s escalation against China \u2014 which is about to face tariffs of at least 104% on goods entering the US \u2014 is the most serious pivot yet in his global tariff onslaught and has the most potential to inflict severe blowback on American citizens in soaring prices.
The confrontation follows years of US attempts to address perceived trade abuses by China. It\u2019s also the culmination of a decade or more of worsening relations prompted by an aggressive and nationalistic shift by a Pacific competitor turned hostile superpower that now seems itching to challenge US might.
And it\u2019s a dark landmark in a diplomatic relationship that will help define the 21st century and a breakdown for a long US project to prevent tensions erupting into a full-on trade war \u2014 or potentially much worse \u2014 between two giants.
The US has been trying to manage China\u2019s emergence for more than 50 years \u2014 since President Richard Nixon\u2019s pioneering visit to Chairman Mao Zedong to \u201copen\u201d an isolated and impoverished nation and to drive a wedge between its leaders and their communist brethren in the Soviet Union. It\u2019s been nearly a quarter-century since another milestone: when the US ushered China into the World Trade Organization in hopes of promoting democratic change and locking it into a rules-based, Western-oriented economic system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ultimate failure of those well-intentioned efforts is being laid bare in Trump\u2019s second term. The president rose to power on a populist wave that was partly a reaction to globalization that exported US industrial jobs to China and left blight in its wake.
Prospects for a deal with China seem grim
Trump claims that scores of nations are eager to make trade deals to defray painful US tariffs.
But China isn\u2019t joining their ranks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beijing rebuffed Trump\u2019s warning not to retaliate against an earlier 34% tariff on top of a first round of duties \u2014 warning that it was ready to fight to \u201cthe end.\u201d The US leader, caught up in a fast-spiraling clash with President Xi Jinping, then had to preserve his credibility by making good on his threat to impose a gargantuan import tax from goods from the world\u2019s second-largest economy on Wednesday.
\u201cCountries like China who have chosen to retaliate and try to double down on their mistreatment of American workers are making a mistake,\u201d White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday. \u201cPresident Trump has a spine of steel, and he will not break, and America will not break under his leadership.\u201d
The vast stock of personal and political capital Trump has now invested in the faceoff with Xi makes this the most serious lurch of a volatile week since the US president announced his \u201cLiberation Day\u201d tariffs in the White House Rose Garden.
China is showing every sign that it thinks it can outlast Trump in their clash, for which it has been preparing for years. And it\u2019s not clear Trump and his top officials are fully prepared for the extent of China\u2019s resilience or the pain it can impose on American consumers.
If the US president assumed that what he almost daily hails as his \u201cgreat relationship\u201d with Xi would yield a quick Chinese climbdown, he\u2019s wrong. The prospect of a trade agreement with Beijing similar to the one in the first Trump term, which largely fell apart during the pandemic, seems distant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Trump\u2019s aggression is unparalleled. He believes he has a unique and perhaps final opportunity to transform the US dynamic with what the US Trade Representative\u2019s office describes as the world\u2019s largest trading nation. \u201cWe have one shot at this,\u201d Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. China\u2019s official media bristles with certainty that America is an empire in decline. Far from being a show of strength, Trump\u2019s second presidency and the political chaos he incites are seen as symptoms of weakness. China has been the top foreign supplier of goods to the US, accounting for up to 16% of total imports in recent years, according to the USTR. It dominates the market in smartphones, computers and toys \u2014 likely to be hit by massive price hikes that take them out of reach of many Americans when the new tariffs come into force. Taken together with Biden administration tariffs on China, which expanded on Trump first-term duties, China now faces an effective average tariff rate of 125%. President Donald Trump just ignited a direct showdown with the one nation that might be able to beat the United States in a trade war. Trump\u2019s escalation against China \u2014 which is about to face tariffs of at least 104% on goods entering the US \u2014 is the most serious pivot yet in his global […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":13253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-international"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.funminews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/fc427006-a700-45d8-8706-7e3a4db84d80_9543203f.jpg?fit=1020%2C680&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13254"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13256,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13254\/revisions\/13256"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Tensions are peaking over trade with hubris on both sides<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump\u2019s claims that the US has been \u201craped\u201d and \u201cpillaged\u201d by trade partners are hyperbolic. But his grievances about Beijing\u2019s behavior have been shared by multiple presidents. Tensions often flare over import dumping, market access for US firms, intellectual property theft, currency manipulation and industrial espionage. Previous White Houses pursued targeted enforcement and other penalties to try to reshape China\u2019s behavior. Years of acrimony in the relationship have fueled the shared bipartisan doctrine in Washington that Beijing is the preeminent military and economic threat to US power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But his method is impulsive and indiscriminate; it lacks a clear strategy.
It also shows little respect for Chinese dignity and power \u2014 a recurring theme in the administration\u2019s dealings with other countries.
Vice President JD Vance, for instance, last week mocked China in criticizing past US trading policy. \u201cWe borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture,\u201d he said. \u201cThat is not a recipe for economic prosperity. It\u2019s not a recipe for low prices, and it\u2019s not a recipe for good jobs in the United States of America,\u201d Vance told \u201cFox & Friends.\u201d
The vice president\u2019s contemptuous remarks ignored the transformation in China\u2019s economy. It is now a global leader in innovation on artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, energy production and in many other areas. Beijing on Tuesday condemned Vance\u2019s words as \u201castonishing,\u201d \u201clamentable,\u201d \u201cignorant\u201d and \u201cdisrespectful.\u201d
There are high-stakes political, global, economic reasons why Xi can\u2019t bend.
The ruthless Chinese leader presents himself as a historic catalyst of Chinese civilization\u2019s rightful return to power and prestige. A capitulation to a tough-talking American president would therefore be unthinkable. Showing weakness to the United States would also undercut China\u2019s own power and would be seen as a loss of face \u2014 especially within Asia.
China\u2019s rhetoric, meanwhile, is peppered with assumptions that the US is trying to devastate its economy and political system. Liu Pengyu, spokesman for China\u2019s embassy in Washington, for instance, condemned US tariffs on Tuesday as \u201cabuse\u201d and as an infringement of China\u2019s \u201clegitimate rights.\u201d
In Beijing, as in Washington, hubris is stoking the antagonism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump\u2019s histrionics and attacks on US allies, including in Southeast Asia, also play into China\u2019s argument that the United States is not a reliable partner, and that China\u2019s brand of capitalism twinned with political control is a better model.
China\u2019s confidence ahead of what could be a dragged-out trade battle with the United States is also rooted in Xi\u2019s reorientation and modernizing of the Chinese economy.
\u201cI think if you are Xi Jinping right now, you\u2019re thinking, \u2018Well, hey, on the metrics that I care about \u2014 technological resilience and self-reliance, we are doing ok, these tariffs may not immediately impact us,\u201d said Lily McElwee, adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Xi may also believe that beyond China\u2019s core strength, it has \u201cretaliatory tools that (it) can impose that will be costly to the United States as well,\u201d said McElwee, who is also president and CEO of the Phoenix Committee on Foreign Relations.
As a real authoritarian leader, Xi, unlike Trump, has no worries about the impact of a trade war on looming elections \u2014 such as the congressional midterms next year.
And while public opinion is still important in China, Xi may reason he can afford to inflict more pain on the Chinese than Trump can on Americans.
If US inflation soars and sets off a recession, it may be the Americans who sue for trade peace on conditions favorable to Beijing.
Americans are about to feel real economic pain<\/strong>
Pain is coming for American consumers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beijing can also inflict other penalties on the United States, such as halting export licenses for rare earth minerals that are vital to the US tech industry \u2014 one reason why Trump may have been so obsessed in finding alternative sources of supply in places like Ukraine and Greenland.
After seeing the severe inflationary impact in the US of supply chain crunches during the pandemic, Chinese leaders could choose to impose new artificial curbs on the flow of goods to the US. American law and commercial firms might be restricted from operating in China. And Beijing could jolt the US agricultural heartland by limiting the import of soy beans and Sorghum. Each of these steps would hurt Chinese as well as Americans \u2014 but they\u2019d demonstrate Xi\u2019s power of retaliation.
Small businesses are also vulnerable. While giants like Apple can seek alternative manufacturing bases \u2014 in India, say \u2014 US firms that rely on goods and components from China will be left hugely exposed.
\u201cIf you are a small business, particularly on the import side or the input side, there\u2019s going to be pain,\u201d said Alex Jacquez, a former special assistant for Economic Development and Industrial Strategy to President Joe Biden. Broader economic consequences will follow. \u201cYou\u2019re looking at a drag on GDP that is going to be a drag on the labor market. You are looking at inflationary pressure,\u201d Jacquez said.
\u201cOne of the concerns here is there is not rational thought or direction to the strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"