April 9 marks a watershed moment in U.S.–China relations. That’s the view of Mike Sun, a U.S.-based businessman with decades of experience advising foreign investors and traders doing business in China.
On this date, China hit the United States back with an extra 50 percent in tariffs, the third round of retaliations from Beijing. Later, Trump raised tariffs on China to a total of 145 percent while pausing higher levies on all other countries. China then raised tariffs on the U.S. to 125 percent.
The Chinese regime has crossed the threshold from being a mere strategic competitor of the United States and started moving toward enemy status, like the Soviet Union during the Cold War, according to Sun.
Cold War or not, the experts we spoke to agreed that U.S.-China relations have turned a page.
The tariff standoff is at its core a battle over the world economic order, experts say, and neither Beijing nor Washington will accept living in a future where the other party sets the rules.
During the previous Trump administration, China proposed to buy American products. Sun said this addressed Trump’s need to reduce the trade deficit between the two countries. The negotiations led to the “phase one” trade agreement signed in January 2020, which Beijing didn’t fulfill.
This time, however, the game is different.
Citing the goal of achieving reciprocity with all countries, Trump is seeking to rebuild the global economic order, Sun said.
“The Chinese Communist Party has seen the difference between Trump’s current and previous approaches, too,” Sun told The Epoch Times. He uses a pseudonym for fear of reprisals from the regime.
“The regime has seen that making concessions to the United States would lead to a future it cannot stomach, so it has chosen to fight.”
Both the United States and China are busy talking to trade partners to build up their camps.
Xi Jinping held a two-day conference with the Party Politburo on April 8 and 9, emphasizing “building a community with a shared future with neighboring countries” and “creating a new situation in neighboring work.”
Meanwhile, Trump has over 70 countries eager to negotiate with the White House. Though he has scaled down the universal tariffs to 10 percent on all countries except for China, they’re still four times as high as they used to be.
The European Union is a weighty player in the global trade order realignment.
Based on Jim’s conversations with officials in Brussels, he said politicians there are currently heavily inclined to decouple from the United States. The Europeans are uncomfortable with the unpredictable nature of Trump’s decisions.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited Beijing on April 10 and 11. China sees the visit as an opportunity to pull the EU to its side. Afterward, Beijing published a four-year “action plan” on strengthening a comprehensive strategic partnership between China and Spain from 2025 to 2028.
Days before Sanchez’s visit to China, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Spain that aligning with China would be “cutting your own throat” because China is looking for a dumping ground going forward for goods that they won’t be able to flood the American market.
Lewis said that playing on China’s terms in the global markets means losses for the United States, Japan, South Korea, Europe, and other countries. Nevertheless, he is concerned that Trump’s actions will shift the global economy away from the United States and toward China.
Alexander Gray, CEO of American Global Strategies and a senior national security official under the first Trump administration, thinks China’s behavior will weigh more in allies’ considerations than the United States’ behavior.
“[Trump] has put China in an untenable position of revealing what many of us already knew: the PRC has built an economy designed to wage economic warfare for the perpetuation of the regime,” he told The Epoch Times in an email.
“Beijing’s unwillingness and inability to change behavior reveals the CCP for what it is and puts the U.S. and its allies and partners in a unified bloc opposing Xi’s malign activity.”
Invading Taiwan remains a viable option for Xi to turn the tables, according to China expert Alexander Liao.
The Chinese military has recently issued an internal communique focused on the following three points, which he learned from his insider access to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
First, a war on Taiwan is bound to happen. The situation may be similar to the Korean War, during which peace talks, which lasted more than two years, were held concurrently with the fighting.
Second, a war between China and the United States is a large possibility.
Third, the PLA distributed the insignia of the various branches of the U.S. military for Chinese soldiers to study so they could tell the enemy’s branch in battles.
“A war can solve many problems for Xi: first, the economy wouldn’t matter so much anymore,” Liao said. “Second, he could calm down his opposing factions within the CCP and give the Chinese people an external reason to justify the rule of the Communist Party.”
