US Tariffs Threaten China’s Globalist Goals

Beijing’s strategic initiatives face severe headwinds due to the Trump administration’s countermeasures.

Cranes and container ships at the Yantian International Container Terminal in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China, on April 12, 2025. AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

For the last quarter century or more, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been building the case for, and laying the framework of, a Beijing-led new world order.

The CCP’s ultimate goal is to replace the existing U.S.-led liberal international order, which operates within the geopolitical and economic framework of multilateral organizations, such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other agencies that have evolved since World War II.

The problem for the communists is that the existing global order promotes liberal values and freedoms, including speech, press, association, and political expression, which directly undermine the CCP’s ongoing efforts to pacify and control the Chinese people and oppressed minority groups. As a result, the Party has developed a strategy that employs the language of the values of the current order while incrementally implementing a multipolar framework that enhances Beijing’s prestige, influence, and leadership, which could be labeled as “globalism with Chinese characteristics.”

While repeating Beijing’s platitudes of “win-win cooperation,” “peaceful cooperation,” and “democracy with Chinese characteristics,” the CCP aims to weaken Western values and the concept of universal human rights while substituting the sovereignty of individual states and non-interference in their domestic affairs as primary emphases. Translation: Beijing rejects the values that shape modern civilized nations, as well as all foreign criticism of the Chinese regime’s human rights violations.

State-run Chinese media routinely propagate supporting messages promoting a CCP-led new world order. Consider this headline from Global Times on April 7: “China is willing to work together with countries, including Canada, to safeguard multilateralism and multilateral trading system.”

Under the Xi Jinping regime, the word “global” has increasingly crept into Chinese communist propaganda. At various intervals, Xi has announced several global initiatives that have a dual purpose: to demonstrate so-called Chinese altruism and world leadership in matters important to all of humankind and to psychologically condition foreigners to the inevitability of the CCP’s global leadership.

Let’s examine those initiatives and what the future may portend for globalism with Chinese characteristics.

Global Digital Economy Partnership City Cooperation Initiative

Marked by annual conferences held in China, this initiative aims to promote exchanges and cooperation between cities worldwide, create a mutually beneficial market environment that is open to all, foster an ecosystem conducive to digital technology innovation, and accelerate urban digital transformation. It also supports green development powered by digital technologies and encourages inclusive cooperation in the global digital sector.

This initiative is Beijing’s tactical siren song for the Digital Silk Road, which presents the same data privacy and cyberespionage pitfalls for the unsuspecting.

An engineer opens the door of a server unit during an organized tour of Huawei's cybersecurity lab in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, China, on April 25, 2019. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Global Data Security Initiative

In response to U.S. efforts to promote the banning of Chinese tech companies, in 2020 Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi proposed this initiative, which includes principles that should be followed for the safeguarding of personal information and preventing cyberespionage and mass surveillance.

Since China has its own rules for censorship and data-sharing, as implemented through the Great Firewall, the likelihood that countries will sign on to this initiative is problematic at best. Does anyone really believe that Beijing will not ask Chinese companies to transfer data overseas to the Chinese regime in breach of other countries’ laws? The Europeans are certainly concerned about unlawful data transfers to China. As usual, sunlight is the best countermeasure for Chinese subterfuge.

Global Development Initiative

Proposed by Xi in 2021, this initiative is intended to promote the achievement of the United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals in eight priority areas: poverty alleviation, food security, pandemic response and vaccines, financing for development, climate change and green development, industrialization, digital economy, and connectivity in the digital era.

The key areas are net-zero emissions and green development, as China is the world’s largest producer of solar panels, electric vehicles, and other green-tech components. The Trump administration is taking the opposite approach by withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Accords (again) and abandoning massive Biden-era green subsidies. The Europeans are also learning about the pitfalls of shedding hydrocarbons and nuclear plants for green power production promises (blindly, from the perspective of outside observers). The Chinese are about to learn economic lessons from the great capitalist Adam Smith that subsidies for the uneconomical are doomed to failure over the long run.

Global Security Initiative

This initiative promotes the adoption of Chinese-centric security norms and operational practices within the existing frameworks of multilateral organizations, such as the U.N. and ASEAN, as key building blocks of global peace.

The Global Security Initiative integrates the Chinese regime’s fundamental diplomatic principles, including the importance of state sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-interference in the internal affairs of countries, and opposition to unilateral sanctions and bloc confrontations.

In announcing the initiative, Xi invoked the concept of indivisible security to make China’s ongoing defense of its core interests seem more palatable to regional partners. The problem for the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, and other countries is that the CCP’s interests always seem to come at their expense, especially in the South China Sea.

The other problem with the initiative is that it promotes the expansion of international Chinese policing. A number of countries, including the United States, have had recent encounters with Chinese police stations that have been discovered to have been hubs for the intimidation of overseas Chinese and persecuted groups like the Falun Gong, as well as for Chinese espionage and influence-peddling operations. Continued U.S. and allied nation counterespionage and prosecutions are the best countermeasures for thwarting this initiative.

Global Civilization Initiative

Announced by Xi in 2024, this initiative promotes a China-centric state-focused and state-defined values system aimed at eliminating universal values in areas such as human rights and democracy. This CCP-dominated “new world order” will replace the current international order that has dominated global development since World War II.

As noted by the Atlantic Council, the CCP’s new world order will be “friendlier to autocratic governments; sovereignty will come at the expense of individual liberties, while universal values such as democracy and human rights, which have been at the core of world affairs for decades, will be stripped from global governance.”

The best countermeasures to this grandiose initiative include the continuing exposure of the CCP’s human rights violations, persecution of Chinese minority groups, forced organ harvesting, intimidation of its neighbors, and other uncivilized actions of the Beijing regime. Who in their right mind wants to live in a world dominated by the Chinese Communist Party?

Concluding Remarks

The problem for Xi and communists is that many nations have caught on to what would be in store in a future world dominated by the CCP: a continuation of Chinese mercantilism at the expense of their own economies, increasing diplomatic threats and intimidation backed up by the belligerence of the People’s Liberation Army, debt traps associated with Chinese investments, economic and cyber espionage, intellectual property theft, cultural genocide, and a trampling of basic human rights.

Recognizing those threats, the Trump administration is isolating China with a new tariff regime aimed at rebalancing international trade and undermining globalism with CCP characteristics. Those tariffs will price out Chinese over-production in the American market (a stake in the heart of one of their mercantilist pillars), put pressure on other countries to tariff Chinese products to earn favor with the United States, undermine Chinese development of supply chains through third party countries to avoid U.S. tariffs and regulations, and pressure China to remove non-tariff regulations and restrictions that impede fair trade.

The U.S. implementation of reciprocal tariffs is isolating China and effectively ending its globalist dreams of a Chinese new world order. Note that China was the only country to blink when President Donald Trump announced the new tariff regime; only China responded by raising tariffs. The Trump administration understands that reciprocal tariffs are kryptonite to China’s export economy, which was built through Beijing’s decades-long exploitation of the World Trade Organization and other international institutions that have promoted free trade.

And that’s great for the world! Make All Nations Great Again!

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.