Trump’s Trade War Is Strengthening China’s Soft Power

President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports have sent millions of manufacturers, retailers, and small businesses on both sides of the Pacific scrambling to cope with a sudden and punishing rise in costs. After Beijing responded with its own retaliatory measures, the White House said that a wide range of Chinese-made goods—from toys to electronics—will now face an effective tariff rate of 145 percent, a steep jump from the 34 percent figure Trump initially outlined just last week.

But despite looming economic pain, China is not backing down or making concessions to Trump. If anything, the government appears more defiant than ever, especially after some political narratives about the country’s manufacturing strength have started to shift in recent years. In the long run, in fact, an escalating battle with the US could wind up being an opportunity for China to leverage its growing soft power. “If the US is determined to fight a tariff and trade war, China’s response will continue to the end,” Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, said in a statement to WIRED.

The US previously justified its punitive trade measures against China by citing the country’s troubling human rights record and accusing it of repeatedly stealing American intellectual property. But China has now developed its own global tech brands, is home to a leading artificial intelligence startup, and has opened more branches of domestic drink shop Mixue than there are Starbucks or McDonald's locations worldwide. The Trump administration’s alleged human rights abuses, meanwhile, are alarming civil liberties groups and observers around the world.

“This is kind of an interesting confluence of events where you have this soft power win over on the China side combined with effectively a complete abdication of soft power altogether from the United States,” says Kevin Xu, founder of the technology hedge fund Interconnected Capital and a former White House staffer under President Obama.

Many Chinese citizens seem pleased that their leaders are standing up to the US, though public polling in the country can be sparse and unreliable. As Trump’s tariffs went into effect, the Chinese government appeared to censor hashtags that mentioned the specifics of the measures, like “104 tariff rate,” but it allowed others focused on making fun of the United States to continue circulating. “America is fighting a trade war while begging for eggs,” read one particularly popular hashtag coined by China’s state broadcaster.

“We support our country in standing firm to the end! We’re not afraid of temporary hardship—what we fear is eternal cowardice," says the owner of an artificial Christmas tree factory in China who asked to remain anonymous due to the risks of speaking to foreign media outlets. The owner tells WIRED that the tariffs are already having negative impacts on her industry, and she expects the competition for non-US markets like South America and Russia to be stiff next year, but “no matter what, we'll get through it.”