James Woudhuysen
Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports to America rose by 10 per cent last week, taking them to 20 per cent in about a month. His pretext was the inflow to the US of the drug, fentanyl, which the White House sees as China’s fault. The response from China’s embassy in Washington was swift. In a tweet, a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spokesman dismissed fentanyl as a ‘flimsy excuse’ to raise tariffs, protested that Beijing had taken robust steps to assist the US in dealing with the issue, and signed off: ‘If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight until the end.’
The ‘any other type of war’ quip has raised more than a few eyebrows. At one level, China’s forthright stance is nothing new. In the face of Washington’s ‘pivot to Asia’ (really, its pivot against China) from the mid-2010s onwards, China has been fighting back, including by battling for territory in the South China Sea. And after Trump ramped up a trade war during his first term, China played tit-for-tat, responding to a 25 per cent US tariff on $34 billion of its products with an identical measure in 2018.
This time, however, the geopolitical context is different from Trump’s first term. Trump’s effective abandonment of Ukraine has weakened America’s relationship with its Western allies – it also suggests the US might not help Taiwan defend itself should China do what Russia did to Ukraine and invade. Meanwhile, Beijing has increased its power and influence in the Indo-Pacific and Latin America. As a result of perceived American weakness, and China’s growing strength, China’s leadership feels more confident than it did even just a few years ago.
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