How China will react to Trump’s trade policies. Le Monde report
China has made it known that it will not hesitate to respond harshly to the tariffs of the next US president. All the details in the Le Monde newspaper article
Even before Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States on January 20, not a week goes by without the two major world powers announcing mutual trade restrictions. In this way, the outgoing American administration seeks to avoid the accusation of laxity leveled by the Republicans on the eve of their return to power. For its part, China is sending a message of firmness. He has made it known that he will not hesitate to take harsh reprisals if the future American head of state carries out his threat of punitive customs barriers against Chinese imports.
Beijing is more exposed than four years ago. Its economy is suffering from slowing growth. Domestic demand is sluggish and exports are increasingly important, which is causing concerns in the European Union and emerging countries such as Brazil and Indonesia.
But China also sees itself as much more resilient, having reduced its dependence on external technology, as demonstrated by its telecommunications champion Huawei. Once severely weakened by being excluded from access to Google's Android operating system for smartphones (2019) and then semiconductors produced in Taiwan (2020), the group has developed its own operating system and is working hard to ensure that its Chinese suppliers catch up in terms of chips. Xi Jinping's policy of technological self-sufficiency, not necessarily accepted by everyone because it could be seen as an internal policy within China, was thus validated by American threats.
PARALLEL CIRCUITS
Faced with the restrictions, Chinese companies and universities are developing workaround strategies to acquire the latest chips via parallel circuits and are trying to adapt. Some groups have also opened factories outside China, for example in northern Vietnam for photovoltaic cells.
In recent months, the spiral of retaliation has intensified. On Monday, January 6, the Pentagon added five Chinese groups to the list of companies it considers a threat to US security. These are the world leader in car batteries, CATL (37% of the global market), and the Internet giant Tencent, whose WeChat application, which combines messaging, social networks and payments, is central to the daily lives of Chinese people.
PRIOR AUTHORIZATION
A week earlier, China targeted US defense and aerospace giants over their arms sales to Taiwan, and on December 9, 2024, Beijing opened an antimonopoly investigation into the intelligence chip champion artificial, Nvidia, which had complied with Washington's request to no longer supply its most advanced products to China. On December 2, 2024, China requested prior authorization for all exports to the United States of several strategic metals used in semiconductor manufacturing, including gallium and germanium, in response to a US ban on supplying certain equipment to China .
While Donald Trump's first presidency was marked by the advent of trade war, Joe Biden retained much of this arsenal and strengthened it, imposing a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles on May 14, 2024. At the same time, However, his government was congratulated for re-establishing communication channels with China that had been severed under Trump.
The risk is that they break up again quickly. On Monday, during a conservative talk show, the American president-elect made it known that his advisors have been in contact with Xi Jinping's entourage, assuring that "they will probably get along very well" , but that "it must be a path to double meaning" . […] China is trying to understand whether there is a possible agreement with the Trump II administration or whether it is China's very existence, its economic power and its political system, which does not require any compromise, that is being rejected.
(Extract from the eprcomunicazione press review)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/risposta-cina-politiche-commerciali-trump/ on Sat, 11 Jan 2025 05:32:02 +0000.