Why China Won’t Call a ‘Tariff-Wielding Barbarian’
Three wise monkeys are perfectly aware of what a pigeon posing as eagle is really up to.
The Toddler Temper Tantrum-style Trump Tariff Tizzy (TTT), now accelerated to 145% – and counting – is yet another thunderous trademark pigeon smashing the chessboard gambit.
It won’t work. Trump claimed that China would call him to “make a deal”. That’s reality show territory. Reality is more like the statement by the Customs Tariff Commission of the State Council: “Given that U.S. exports to China already have no market acceptability under the current tariff rates, if the U.S. further imposes additional tariffs on Chinese goods, China will simply ignore them.”
Translation: keep vociferating/tariffing. We don’t care. And we will stop buying from you. Anything.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry: A “tariff-wielding barbarian can never expect a call from China.”
Basic numbers. China’s GDP for 2025 is projected at 5%. U.S. imports account for at best 4% of Chinese GDP. China’s share of total exports to the U.S. dropped to 13.4 per cent in 2024.
Goldman Sachs – not exactly a CCP “mouthpiece” – has just projected that TTT will cost China only 0.5% of GDP in 2025, while costing no less than 2% of U.S. GDP. Talk about blowback.
Still, from now on, what matters most for Beijing is to keep diversifying the supply chain.
Asia-wide, the extra wheels are in motion. President Xi Jinping will soon start an ASEAN mini-tour (Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia). The Shanghai Cooperation Organization – increasingly focused on geoeconomics – is about to meet. The EU, for all the mendacity of its “elites”, is absolutely itching to strike trade deals with China.
Zhao Minghao, deputy director at the Centre for American Studies at Fudan University, in Shanghai, refers to the current incandescence as “a game of strategic resolve.”
Previously, the eminent Wang Yiwei, international relations star professor at Renmin University in Beijing and an expert on the New Silk Roads, noted that the current tariff rate already made China’s exports to the U.S. “almost impossible”.
This analysis noted how China started to deal with TTT with a “courtesy before force” approach, then turned to “we don’t care”, while cultivating “the art of timing” in its asymmetric attac
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