It’s not often the case, but this is a week when the hard-working spokespeople for China’s foreign ministry have a pretty easy job.
The trade war between the United States and China is escalating rapidly. In February, President Trump imposed 20 percent tariffs on China as punishment for fentanyl trafficking. Last Thursday, he added 34 percent tariffs. When China retaliated with an import tax of its own, Trump imposed an additional 50 percent tariff, which would bring the total rate to a staggering 104 percent.
Internationally, however, there’s a silver lining.
In an initial statement responding to the tariffs that Trump announced last week, China’s foreign ministry accused the US of violating WTO rules and undermining the global economic order, promising that China “will only continue to open its doors wider, regardless of the changing international landscape.”
On Monday, spokesperson Lin Jian posted a message pitched to countries in the Global South, writing, “The latest US tariff hikes will essentially deprive countries of their right to development.”
He added: “Countries need to come together to uphold true multilateralism, oppose unilateralism and protectionism of all forms, and safeguard the international order.”
It’s striking to read these defenses of the “international order.” In recent years, senior US officials and influential commentators have portrayed China as the centerpiece of an “axis of upheaval,” seeking to overthrow the “prevailing world order and its US leadership.”
In 2005, then-Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick gave a widely circulated speech urging China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. The speech has often been held up as the height of naivete, given the years of US-China tensions that followed, but today the charge has been turned around.
The message coming from Beijing now is that the real threat to the US-led international system is coming from inside the house. It’s not only Communist Party functionaries that are starting to see the world this way. As the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf wrote last week, “In today’s world, the US is a revolutionary — more precisely, a reactionary — power, while supposedly communist China is a status quo power.”
“China is positioning itself as the responsible global power,” said Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and former senior adviser for China at the Commerce Department. “It’s basically getting a free pass here from the United States.”
The question is to what extent China will be able to capitalize on that pass.
The Trump administration does not appear to have taken political or strategic implications into account with its tariffs, which were determined by a blanket formula. (The possible exception of Russia, which received no tariffs at all, ostensibly because it is already under heavy US sanctions and does little business with the US — though that’s also true of a number of countries that were included),
In Latin America, Trump-friendly governments like El Salvador and Argentina were tariffed at the same rate as leftist (and more China-friendly) governments like Brazil and Colombia.
Just days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited Japan, where he praised its “warrior ethos” and described it as an “indispensable partner in deterring communist Chinese military aggression,” the country was hit with 24 percent tariffs.
Just because China has been given a diplomatic opening, however, does not necessarily mean it will effectively take advantage.
Some of the heaviest tariffs fell on Vietnam, a country with a complex and wary relationship with its neighbor, China, that the US has spent years cultivating as a security partner.
“China will capitalize on the opportunity created and build more partnerships with aggrieved parties,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center. “The US is dismantling the global trade order that has been established for decades, and there is no better time for China to jump in and demonstrate the alternative. I suspect we will see it in China’s diplomatic playbook across the globe.”
In recent years, China has already become the largest trading partner for sub-Saharan Africa and for most countries in Latin America. It has sought to deepen ties (critics would say “exert control over”) countries throughout the Global South via the Belt and Road Initiative, its massive infrastructure investment program. It has also campaigned for countries to reduce their use of the dollar as a reserve currency. These efforts, which have had some limited success, may accelerate now.
That could mean more investment opportunities for China’s state-owned enterprises and more markets for Chinese goods, including higher-end items like electric vehicles.
China had begun this work even before “Liberation Day.” After Trump imposed punitive tariffs on longtime US ally Colombia over an immigration dispute in the first week of his presidency, Chinese media pushed out messages of solidarity.
Last month, top diplomats from China, South Korea, and Japan — three countries with territorial disputes as well as a shared history of animosity — met to lay the groundwork for a full trilateral summit this summer.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping was already planning a Southeast Asian tour with stops in Vietnam, Malaysia, and Cambodia later this month. That trip will take on added significance with all three countries facing some of Trump’s heaviest tariffs.
Just because China has been given a diplomatic opening, however, does not necessarily mean it will effectively take advantage.
On the same day that Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi was in Japan for the trilateral meeting, the China Coast Guard made its longest-ever incursion into waters disputed between the two countries in the East China Sea — exactly the sort of action sure to exacerbate longstanding tensions and remind Japan of the value of its relationship with the US.
Will China get closer to the EU?
Relations between Europe and China have been increasingly tense in recent years over a variety of issues, including China’s support for Russia amid the war in Ukraine, its intellectual property practices, and Beijing’s own economic coercion against countries it feels insulted by.
Shortly after Trump’s announcement, China’s commerce ministry announced it was restarting negotiations with the European Union over the bloc’s tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez, one of the more China-friendly leaders in the EU, is headed to Vietnam and China this week, with plans to meet Xi and Chinese investors. The EU and China are due to hold a summit this summer, possibly as early as July, during which China will almost certainly seek to capitalize on the growing transatlantic divide.
Europe was already reeling from Trump’s undermining of NATO’s security guarantee, threats to annex Greenland, and about-face on Ukraine policy. The tariffs are yet more evidence that Europe can no longer take its relationship with the United States for granted.
“We consider the United States of America a traditional ally that respects values and the international order,” European Commission executive vice president Teresa Ribera, one of Europe’s top trade officials, told reporters at a meeting in Washington following Trump’s sanctions announcement last week, “So we did not expect this set of unilateral measures that may create situations that harm the global economy.”
For the past decade, the US has urged European countries to “de-risk” their economic relationship with China, through steps like restricting the use of Chinese company Huawei’s 5G internet equipment. These policies became an easier sell after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but now, China is likely to try to make inroads again.
“A decade of ever closer transatlantic coordination on China policy is coming to an end,” Noah Barkin, a visiting senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund who studies the Europe-China relationship, told Vox.
However, Barkin said, this did not necessarily portend closer EU-China relations. China could look to offset the impact of the tariffs selling more to Europe.
“The EU will be throwing its entire trade toolbox at Beijing to prevent a flood of Chinese exports into Europe,” said Barkin. “That will increase tensions in the short to medium term.”
This is a dispute that could, in theory, be worked out at this summer’s summit, but, added Barkin, “There are no signs that China is prepared to adjust its economic strategy in order to suit Europe.”
One potential future: “Globalization minus America”
An unresolved question about Trump’s tariffs is whether he is seeking concessions from the countries that have been targeted or simply trying to reset the rules of the global economy in a way he feels will advantage the US.
After Vietnam offered to lower its tariffs on US products to zero, White House adviser Peter Navarro rejected the notion, saying “this is not a negotiation.” But Trump has also boasted that “countries from all over the World are talking to us” and that Japan is “sending a top team to negotiate.”
He has also signaled that he is open to a trade deal with South Korea on trade as well as “other topics” writing “‘ONE STOP SHOPPING’ is a beautiful and efficient process!!”
China was already facing its own economic headwinds from factors like an overreliance on exports and a rapidly aging population, and Trump himself seems confident that Beijing will fold.
This would seem to suggest some countries may be able to cut deals with Washington for tariff relief — though given that some countries already covered by formal trade deals with the US were tariffed, these governments will likely be wary about how long these arrangements will last.
Globally, countries have abundant reason to be wary of China’s intentions, from its territorial ambitions to its human rights practices to its own coercive trading practices.
But the argument that the US has often leveled — that China is a predatory actor on the world stage, using trade and investment to bend countries to its will — has become harder to make in a world where the president of the United States is bragging about the countries coming to grovel before him.
None of this is to say that China’s economy is not about to take a massive hit. According to a Citigroup estimate, the “Liberation Day” tariffs alone could knock 2.4 percentage points off of China’s GDP growth in 2025. China is taking some measures to offset this hit, such as allowing its currency to depreciate, but the impact of Trump’s moves could be even greater if it triggers a recession in the US or other Chinese export markets, as many economists fear. China was already facing its own economic headwinds from factors like an overreliance on exports and a rapidly aging population, and Trump himself seems confident that Beijing will fold. He wrote on social media, “China also wants to make a deal, badly, but they don’t know how to get it started. We are waiting for their call. It will happen!”
But China’s government seems confident it can weather the storm. Trump may also have given the Chinese government one of the most valuable commodities in politics: a convenient scapegoat. “Xi Jinping can say the United States is attacking us, and that’s going to produce a nationalist impulse within China,” said Economy. “What we’re doing has the potential to bolster Xi Jinping at a time when his own economy is struggling.”
After recent meetings with Chinese policymakers, China analyst Ryan Hass of the Brookings Institution posted on X, “There’s debate [in Beijing] about whether the world is entering a period of blocs or a transition to an era of globalization minus the US. Beijing seems to prefer the latter scenario.”
Trump administration officials argue that they now have an opportunity to, in the words of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “reset the global order of trade,” overturning a system that privileged other countries — China in particular — at America’s expense.
But the view from Beijing may be that rather than rewriting the rules, America is simply leaving the playing field. China is more than happy to pick up the ball.
