Who knew being subject to tariffs of 30% would be considered a victory for Beijing? What's more, it's not only Chinese propaganda that frames the story this way but throngs of Western commentators afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome, who will jump on any opportunity to denigrate the US president, even if it means taking sides with the communist regime half the world away.
That Democrats are parroting the Chinese is no surprise, of course, but there are many people in the West fashioning themselves to be analysts who follow the same course.
Ian Bremmer, the founder of Eurasia Group was cited as saying: "The Americans suddenly do not want to decouple any more, Dr Bremmer said. “Recognising they can’t trade at all with the present 145 per cent tariffs, they reached out to China to start negotiations.” The Chinese had shown no signs of picking up the phone, he noted."
Really? If the Chinese didn't want to pick up the phone then what did just happen in Geneva, within two weeks of Trump's invitation? Let's remind ourselves of how the exchange went:
- Trump: Those tariffs are not forever, y'know, I think we can get a deal with Beijing.
- Beijing: No deal! Cancel tariffs!
- Trump: Yeah, y'know, we were in touch with the Chinese.
- Beijing: No you weren't! No talks as long as there are tariffs! (quietly removes tariffs on 1/4 of American imports)
- Trump: We're gonna have the talks soon.
- Beijing: No, you're not!
- Trump: See you in Switzerland!
- Beijing: OK, see you there...
Weren't the Chinese willing to pick up the phone or were they simply putting up a brave face while bilateral contacts – as described by Trump – kept going on in the background?
After all, meetings of the highest calibre are not agreed upon overnight and require at least a few days of advance preparation. But we're talking about a total span of only two weeks between Trump calling on China to talk and the meeting actually taking place.
It looks as though Beijing picked the phone up quite quickly.
The best outcome for China!
This isn't a message from the Global Times but Bloomberg, which starts its report with the following summary: "Mr Xi Jinping’s decision to stand his ground against US President Donald Trump could hardly have gone any better for the Chinese leader."
This point is being propped up later in the article by another "analyst" Trey McArver, co-founder of research firm Trivium China: “This is arguably the best outcome that China could have hoped for – the US backed down. Going forward, this will make the Chinese side confident that they have leverage over the US in any negotiations.”
Imagine that! China has leverage over the US, which is why the US is charging three times the tariff rate on Chinese exports that Beijing imposed in return.
It's a truly amazing achievement by emperor Xi Jinping, who clearly knows how to play Trump any way he wants!
In arguing that it is a huge victory for the PRC the "analysts" are pointing to the fact that the baseline tariff has been reciprocally reduced to 10% and the extra 20% has been imposed by the US as a punitive measure aiming to force China to stop exports of fentanyl precursors to Mexico, which then flood the USA with the lethal drug.
First of all, for that rate to even be subject to reductions, the flow of fentanyl has to stop and China has to honour whatever commitments it is going to make about it. As we all know, Beijing isn't great at following its own word.
Secondly, the mutual climbdown is only a temporary overture to actual talks that are going to proceed over the next 90 days, so the eventual tariff rates imposed by the US, and the categories of goods they are going to cover, are yet to be determined.
The practical reality is that until any of that happens most exports from China to the US will be charged 30% at the border.
And a 30% rate is by any measure the highest blanket tariff imposed on another country anywhere in the world. THAT is the status quo, no matter how you might be trying to spin it against Americans.
Incidentally, it is also is in the vicinity of the average of roughly 20% that Trump administration is aiming to charge from all of the inward trade (I will explain why in another article), so I wouldn't expect it to be meaningfully reduced just for China, which the US is suffering the worst deficits with.
Useful idiots
As Mark Twain reportedly observed: "history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes" and we can see it in the reactions of Westerners consumed with self-hate exhibited by their loathing of the US president, which is so extreme that it makes them side with one of the most oppressive totalitarian regimes in the world, even though there's no objective basis for it.
Vladimir Lenin is said to have coined a term for such people: "useful idiots".
Back in the day they would be cheering for the communists in the Soviet Union, failing to understand that their lives and they themselves would become the eventual victims of the global communist revolution.
They betrayed the interests of their own nations and the entire Western civilisation for a sense of momentary self-righteousness.
This is not to say that Trump doesn't have flaws, that he doesn't behave erratically or downright recklessly at times, but there's an objective reality that can be described by numbers and those numbers do not look good for China even after the agreement struck in Geneva.
