Chinese state media is boisterously touting the country’s ability to win a trade war against the U.S., signaling that Beijing is not ready to back down in the escalating spat with Washington.
In response to President Donald Trump’s tough steel and aluminum tariffs, Beijing fired back with tariffs on American exports worth roughly $3 billion annually. The U.S. is now threatening China with punitive trade measures worth around $50 billion annually in response to Chinese theft of American intellectual property and forced technology transfers, and Beijing is threatening to hit U.S. goods with tariffs of the same intensity.
The U.S. is taking aim at China’s ambitious Made in China 2025 development plan, while China is targeting critical American exports, many of which are produced by Trump’s base.
A new article in the Chinese state-run People’s Daily argues that China has “the power to win this trade war.”
Less than 24 hours after the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative published a list of over one thousand Chinese products to be targeted by the Trump administration’s latest trade penalties, “China showed its sword, responding with a counterattack of the same scale and strength that was so swift and fierce that the Americans were caught off guard,” an article in the People’s Daily explained, stressing that China has the economic resiliency and the confidence to win the trade war.
The nationalist Chinese tabloid Global Times also weighed in on the ongoing dispute, arguing that “although China will sustain financial losses thanks to the U.S.’ Section 301 investigation tariffs, they will pale in comparison to the damage done to the U.S. economy via China’s retaliations.”
“China’s counter tariffs are a spectacular way of standing up to America’s bullying tactics, not only for itself, but for other countries threatened by the US’s new trade policies,” the paper wrote, painting China as the victim in Washington’s quest to prevent other countries from stealing U.S. intellectual property at a price of hundreds of billions of dollars paid by the American people.
“Washington will eventually see what they have lost,” Global Times wrote, arguing, “Now, as China deploys its counterattack, the pleasure that the US achieved from those tariffs will now cause them suffering as their financial and political gains diminish to zero.”
Neither country has actually implemented the hard-hitting tariffs they are proposing, and the White House has attempted to downplay trade war concerns. Beijing is reportedly calling on the U.S. to negotiate while stating that it is prepared to fight until the end if Washington decides to fight.
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