Name: How China Plays the Long Game Against Trump
Uploaded: 2026-03-27T21:36:33.000Z
Duration: 10 min 34 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

There's a phrase which China's President Xi Jinping likes to use: the world is undergoing changes which have not been seen in 100 years.

Now these changes have appeared to arrive, but they're delivered unexpectedly by Donald Trump.

Amid the noise of war, the stance of another major power is speaking volumes.

中方敦促各方立即停止军事行动。 The U.S.

is demonstrating itself to be a force for instability in the world,

and that gives President Xi and China a chance to present themselves as the adults in the room.

China is happy to see the United States getting bogged down in the Middle East.

China has long viewed the existing order as being too dominated by the U.S., so Trump's challenges to that order actually present Xi Jinping a very good opportunity,

and the question is whether Xi is ready to seize it.

Trump's first trade war made China realize that dependence on the U.S. is a very dangerous thing.

but in the end China had a record trade surplus hitting 1.2 trillion U.S.

China deliberately tried to diversify away from the U.S. as a consumer base.

So do Trump's actions strengthen China, or expose it to more risk it cannot control?

The U.S.-China relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world,

And it's in the hands of two very different leaders.

It's hard to imagine two people with more different approaches to leadership.

Xi Jinping is guarded, methodical, someone who plays the long game, not the Twitter game.

China's policymakers see Trump as someone who's transactional and pragmatic, who likes to make deals.

They also realize that Trump is very unpredictable.

What the markets have realized is that he doesn't execute all of those threats.

A lot of them are just quietly forgotten.

And the internet, as usual, has found a name for it.

The term is actually pretty popular on Chinese social media, too.

On Chinese social media, people love Donald Trump.

Another really popular nickname for Trump is 川建国, which actually means Trump the nation builder.

That's not praising Trump as a nation builder for the United States.

It's more like Trump helping China to become a superpower.

We're seeing Xi is basically just sitting back to enjoy the benefits as a flurry of Western leaders coming to Beijing.

It's vital that we build a more sophisticated relationship.

They know that China, like all nation-states, will act in its own self-interest.

What they are seeking and signaling is a hedge against the United States, which they now view as an unreliable partner.

China was really caught off guard by Trump's first trade war because it was launched just months after his first visit to China, where he received a lavish welcome.

So since then, it has been preparing itself.

In China, there's a famous saying: "Learning is like sailing upstream; pause,

and you're pushed back." And this mindset now shapes Beijing's strategy in the second trade war.

President Trump tried to deal a knockout blow to China.

What the U.S. wasn't expecting was that China would hit back.

China retaliated on the U.S. with tariffs of 125%.

China has learned how to play this game, and President Trump knows that.

This latest headline coming in from the Supreme Court: global tariffs struck down.

China says it is assessing President Trump's second tariff investigation this week as the U.S.

continues its effort to rebuild the key trade policy.

fell about 20%, but if you look at India, they jumped 12.8%.

To Southeast Asian countries, they rose 13.5%.

But trade flows are just one arm of China's strategy.

Explicit export controls on rare earth magnets.

China imposed export controls on seven types of rare earth minerals and magnets made of them.

These export controls are really inflicting pain on the U.S.

manufacturing base because these rare earth magnets are used in everything from iPhones and EVs to big-ticket weapons like fighter jets and missiles.

The pain goes beyond U.S. manufacturers, since producers around the world are impacted by these controls.

And although these measures could backfire as countries explore ways to lessen their reliance on China, those efforts will take time.

China dominates the supply chain, mining over 60% of the world's rare earths and refining over 90% of them.

Rare earths by themselves are not big deals.

The entire category, the market cap, was not even 10 billion U.S. dollars.

As a result, other countries, they have pretty much given up on rare earth production and refinery process.

Its labor cost is really low, and its environmental standards are pretty lax.

The rare earth industry has been considered strategic for decades.

China has the world's most complete industrial catalogs.

But despite the trade wins against Trump, China has issues its industrial success can't fix.

Beijing set a GDP growth target of 4.5 to 5% for the year.

China's economy has a lot of really serious problems: local governments, businesses, real estate developers.

and they used those borrowed funds to build too much capacity, bridges to nowhere, steel mills producing more steel than anyone could ever need, ghost towns of empty property.

As a result of that overcapacity, China now has a deflation problem.

For years, China's economic rise has been fueled by its booming exports and investment.

But last year, we saw China's fixed asset investment decline for the first time on record.

So it's really just the exports that keep the economy going.

Chinese workers are seeing their pay cuts or even getting fired and struggling to find jobs.

Some of them choose to go into the gig economy, which doesn't really provide a sense of job security.

What a lot of countries realized was that China was actually exporting its deflation overseas.

Whatever they couldn't dump to the United States, they were dumping to Southeast Asia, Latin America, or Europe.

That complicates the relationships China is forging, even as more countries engage China to hedge against an unreliable U.S.