Xi Jinping wants you to know that he will not be grown.
Faced with the last threat of President Trump of an extra rate of 50 percent on Chinese goods, unless Beijing reverses his retaliation taxes on American import, the top leader of China has remained challenging. His Ministry of Trade accused the United States of “Chantage” on Tuesday and stated that Beijing “would fight” until the end “.
But behind the Bravoure is a more complicated series of realities for Mr XI that makes it politically and economically untenable to offer concessions to the largest trading partner and the leadership of the country for global influence. Mr Trump also refuses to go back, a devastating trade war between the two largest economies can be inevitable – a confrontation with painful consequences that will be felt all over the world.
The dilemma for Mr XI is that weak is not looking an option, but the return of a further escalation. The Chinese leader has cast himself as a national savior who rejuvenates the greatness of his country. As a result, Beijing has less flexibility to withdraw from a fight with Washington, as other American trading partners such as Vietnam have tried, because it could undermine the legitimacy of Mr XI, analysts say.
“Beijing's answer to date has emphasized three things: determination, resilience and retribution,” said Julian Gewirtz, a former senior China policy officer at the White House and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under President Biden who is now writing a book about the relations between the US and China.
“XI has built up an image of itself as a challenging strong man who helps a powerful country, and the official messages from China is that they are determined to determine to absorb American pressure, even at high costs,” he said.
That helps explain why China closed a deal to sell part of the tapping to American investors last week in response to Mr Trump's radical rates, and why it opposes a sale of the ports owned by the Hong Kong -CK Hutchison along the Panama Canal.
It also plays in why Beijing threatened more countermeasures on Tuesday when Mr. Trump continued with an extra 50 percent rates on Chinese goods. China said it is willing to hold conversations, but not under force.
The leaders of China probably also calculate that a collision with the Trump administration is inevitable, analysts say. Mr Trump's rates last week – which also set countries such as Vietnam and Thailand, where Chinese companies set up factories to bypass earlier American rates – would be seen in Beijing as proof that Washington is determined to block the rise of China.
“From this advantage, there is little to be gained in capitulating Trump's last requirement because it would not solve the underlying challenge of the United States,” said Ryan Hass, the director of the John L. Thornton China Center in the Brookings Institution. “In the best case, they believe, it would only be the determination of America to destroy the Chinese economy.”
The rising tensions make a meeting between Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump increasingly unlikely.
Mr. Trump, who regards the unpredictability as his characteristic weapon, has said that he is open to Mr. Xi, even suggests that the Chinese leader would visit. But Chinese officials are reluctant to plan a meeting until the two parties have negotiated details in advance.
Even if Mr. Xi were to vomit and submit to Mr Trump's requirements to cancel China's retribution rates, it is unclear what the trade agreement would make a meaningful dent in the yawn trade ethic between the two countries. The United States imported $ 440 billion in Chinese goods last year, more than three times the value of the $ 144 billion of American goods that China has imported.
Beijing sees Mr Trump as uniquely focused on undermining China's dominance in export to bring production back to the United States, said Yun Sun, the director of the China program in the Stimson Center in Washington.
“Decoupling is perhaps the endgame,” said Mrs. Yun, descriptively how China probably interprets Mr Trump's motives.
Mr. Xi has long warned that the rise of China would probably not remain undisputed by the West and invested heavily in attempts to build China's self -reliance.
This week, while stock markets are tumbling around the world, Beijing Banks and Investment Companies in the State, Mobilized Informally in China as the 'National Team', to strengthen their participations of Chinese shares in an attempt to stop the decline. Chinese shares rose somewhat on Tuesday after Big drops a day before.
And the People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, published a comment on Sunday to insist Chinese citizens to have faith in China's ability to withstand the rates. The piece argued that China has expanded its trade markets outside the United States and that the Chinese economy becomes self -sufficient with the help of breakthroughs in technology such as artificial intelligence.
Economists say that those points are true, but that a complete trade war on the scale of the Lord Trump is still causing a lot of pain to China. If the Trump administration imposes an extra rate of 50 percent, this can bring the US levy to Chinese goods to 104 percent. For some products, however, the rate is probably much higher due to rates that date from Mr Trump's first term.
Chinese exporters may not easily reduce their goods to other countries, because the electricity of Chinese exports is already delivered to large markets such as the European Union.
At the same time, analysts in China think in this tariff game that Mr Trump will sooner collapse for domestic pressure to change tack due to the increasing costs of goods and falling share values in the United States.
“If it is a matter of those who can endure more pain, China will not lose,” says Wang Wen, dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University in Beijing.
The United States needed China, Mr Wen said, more than China needed the United States because Chinese factories make parts and components that cannot be found anywhere else in the world.
“Other countries will buy goods from China and then sell them to the United States,” he said.
Part of China's strategy has also been to use the chaotic consequences of Mr Trump's rates to try to pull the rest of the world away from the Washington's job.
Reportedly, Mr XI is planning to visit Southeast Asian countries next week, including Vietnam. Beijing has also tried to project a united front with Japan and Zuid -Korea at Mr Trump's rates, although officials in Tokyo and Seoul, both of whom are confronted with safety, have distanced themselves from the Chinese position.
On the same day that Mr. Trump revealed his rates, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a video on social media that cast the United States as a source of damage and instability, with references to the push of the US President to deport migrants and rates imposed on cars that are delivered new to a port. “Do you want to live in such a world?” A storyteller asks.
That was followed by scenes of Chinese peacet troops and Chinese rescue teams that pulled victims out of the rubble after the recent earthquake of Myanmar, placed above a soundtrack with John Lennon's “Imagine”.
“There is no doubt that Beijing is milking this moment,” says Danny Russel, a diplomacy and security analyst at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington. The video of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is “Pure Propaganda Jujitsu” focused on “Painting Trump's rates as reckless American chaos while China offers order and partnership.”
“But Beijing's position is conflict,” said Mr. Russel. “The Instinct of Beijing is to prevent him from interrupting his enemy when he makes a mistake, but they are also deeply concerned that those mistakes can crash the world economy, and China with it.”
