China has accused Washington of ‘blackmail’ and said it will ‘fight to the end’ after Donald Trump threatened overnight to impose an additional 50 per cent tariff on Chinese imports. At the same time, President Xi Jinping is seeking to present himself as a responsible champion of the international trading system and defender of globalisation against the Trump wrecking ball. Neither position bears scrutiny; the latter is almost laughable, since it is Beijing’s persistent disregard of international rules that has fuelled the anger in America in the first place.
It all smacks of desperation and not the ‘super economy’ of CCP propaganda
As part of its strategy, the Chinese Communist party is seeking to downplay the impact on its ‘super economy’, as the People’s Daily described it at the weekend, insisting the country is strong and resilient. More sympathetic foreign journalists have received tours of high-tech facilities. ‘I saw the future. It was not America’, declared Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, after he was shown Huawei’s Shanghai campus.
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