Advertisement
Cracking the trade war code: why China and the US may quietly reach an agreement
- The trade war rhetoric doesn’t reflect the reality of China-US relations. To understand where the two sides are heading, we should consider their economic interdependence, stock markets and coded messages they have been sending
Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
On May 20, 1970 – a date every Chinese pupil knows by heart – after American and South Vietnamese forces mounted an incursion into Cambodia, Chairman Mao Zedong famously issued a statement, “People of the world, unite and defeat the US aggressors and all their running dogs!”, which was read out the next morning to a 500,000-strong crowd at an anti-US rally in Tiananmen Square.
Advertisement
On May 20, 2019, a cheering crowd in Jiangxi province listened as President Xi Jinping called for a “new Long March” and a new start in the face of escalating trade tensions with the United States.
What the crowd didn’t know in 1970 – which only became public decades later – was that at the same time Mao was urging countries to “take up arms and control the fate of their own country”, he, through premier Zhou Enlai, was engaged in secret negotiations with the US, which ultimately led to the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam and the normalisation of China-US relations.
Advertisement
We will need to wait, probably until around the G20 meeting in Osaka at the end of June, to see if China and the US have successfully negotiated a resolution to the trade dispute.
Advertisement