China retaliated<\/a> by applying its own charges on US-owned, operated, built or flagged vessels.<\/p>\n\u201cFor the US, its actions on chip exports and shipping industry fees were not related to the trade deal with China,\u201d said Vina Nadjibulla, vice president for research and strategy at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.<\/p>\n
Since then, the two countries have also been in an \u201cinformation war\u201d, said Nadjibulla, each blaming the other for holding the world hostage with its policies.<\/p>\n
But beyond the rhetoric, the world is seeing China really up its game.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the first time, China is doing this extra-terrestrial action that applies to other countries as well [with its amped up export restrictions on rare-earths]. They are prepared to match every US escalation, and have the US back down,\u201d Nadjibulla said. \u201cThis is a very different kind of a trade war than we were experiencing even three months ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was a \u201cpower play\u201d by China in the run-up to a planned meeting later this month between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea because \u201cChina has decided that the leverage is on their side,\u201d said Dexter Tiff Roberts, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Global China Hub, pointing out that after some initial noise with Trump saying there was no reason to meet Xi any longer, the meeting is back on.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at the approach of the Trump administration right now, they are all over the place,\u201d said Roberts.<\/p>\n
Roberts was referring not only to the multiple tariff threats that the US has issued both on China and on specific industries and the carve-outs that were soon announced on those, but also in its statements on the Trump-Xi meeting, with Trump saying it was not happening, only to reverse that two days later.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Trump administration doesn\u2019t quite know how to deal with China,\u201d said Roberts. \u201cThey don\u2019t understand that China is willing to accept a lot of pain,\u201d and will not be easily cowed by US threats.<\/p>\n
Beijing, on the other hand, has realised that Trump is determined to get his big deal with China and wants his state visit to seal that, maybe because \u201che feels that is important to his credentials as a big deal maker,\u201d added Roberts, but that he cannot get there without giving more to China.<\/p>\n
\u201cChina saw that they could push harder in the lead-up to the meeting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wei Liang, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies who specialises in international trade and Chinese economic foreign policy, agrees.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrump has a track record of TACO,\u201d she said, referring to a term coined by a Financial Times columnist in May, which stands for \u201cTrump always chickens out\u201d in reference to his announcing tariffs and then carving out exemptions and pushing out implementation dates.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe cares more than any other US president [about] stock market reactions, so definitely will be more flexible to making concessions. This is the inconsistency that has been captured by his negotiation partners,\u201d Liang said.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s defiant stance also comes at a time of its own political concerns, Liang added.<\/p>\n
While the domestic economy is \u201ca black box\u201d with no reliable data available on growth, employment and other criteria, the consensus among China experts is that the country has been hit by the tariffs, economic growth has slowed, and unemployment has ramped up.<\/p>\n
As China started its four-day fourth plenary session on Monday where it plans to approve the draft of its next five-year national economic and social development plan, Xi can use the moment to tell his domestic audience that the country\u2019s problems are stemming from Trump\u2019s policies and the whole world is suffering because of those tariffs and it\u2019s not related to Chinese policies, Liang said.<\/p>\n
A possible decoupling<\/p>\n
All of this also signals that Beijing seems to be prepared to \u201cdecouple\u201d from the US more than ever, a significant change in mentality, as, in the past, the standard response to the idea was that it would be a \u201close-lose\u201d situation for both countries, Liang told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
But in the last few years, China has diversified its exports to other countries, especially those in its Belt and Road Initiative, the ambitious infrastructure project that it launched in 2013 to link East Asia through Europe and has since expanded to Africa, Oceania and Latin America.<\/p>\n
Even when it comes to things that it needs from the US \u2013 soya beans, aeroplanes and high-tech chip equipment \u2013 it can find other suppliers or has learned to work around that need, as is the case for the chip equipment, Liang pointed out.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, especially in the years since the US-China trade war started under Trump as president in his first term, China has brought in a set of national security laws \u2013 including its version of the US Entity List, through which it is setting limits on those exports, Nadjibulla said.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody should have been preparing the way the Chinese have been preparing. We breathed a sigh of relief when there was a change in government [in the US after the first Trump administration], but China kept preparing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis should be a wake-up call for all countries to find other sources for its needs. Everyone should be redoubling their efforts to diversify, because we have now seen the Chinese playbook.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Relations between the United States and China are tense, once again, with experts saying that the administration of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518020,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[11410,12633,1395,32,1700,3058,1219,49,978,286,659,1773],"class_list":{"0":"post-518019","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-asia-pacific","9":"tag-business-and-economy","10":"tag-china","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-economy","13":"tag-international-trade","14":"tag-trade-war","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-us-canada","18":"tag-usa","19":"tag-xi-jinping"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115414416982517706","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518019\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}