Leslie Fong

Asian Angle | Korean war to trade war, China has a Trump card against US: resilience

Tariffs are just the opening salvo in America’s battle to slow China’s rise, a head-on collision that China’s leaders have long seen coming. Beijing won’t be caught napping

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US President Donald Trump with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. Chinese leaders are unlikely to be unprepared for the day when the Americans come spoiling for a fight. Photo: AFP

Leslie Fong

Published: 1:00pm, 29 Sep 2018Updated: 1:24pm, 29 Sep 2018

The escalating trade war between China and the United States is more than just a mighty tussle over imports and exports – and the elite in both Beijing and the West know it.

It is, in effect, a battle of the utmost strategic importance, pitting China against a coterie of Western nations that see it as the gravest threat to their dominance of the existing world order. Slapping on tariffs is just the opening salvo.

On the one side, there is the clear (if not publicly admitted) goal of slowing down (if not containing altogether) China’s seemingly inexorable rise as a superpower. And on the other is China’s determination not to bow to the collective might of the West and forfeit the right to decide its own destiny.

On present reckoning, it does not appear that either side will back down. And so the stage is set for a long, bruising contest of will, with the rest of the world as collateral damage.

Contrary to what some analysts have argued, Beijing has not been caught wrong-footed in this confrontation. At the tactical level, the Chinese leadership might have underestimated the swiftness and scale of the American responses in the ongoing tit-for-tat imposition of tariffs – or the duplicity of the European Union, which now says it wants to forge a consensus with the US and Japan against unfair Chinese trade practices.

But at the strategic level, China’s leaders, past and present, have long seen this head-on collision coming.