In its trade war with America, China dials down the hype

JUST a week into what could prove a long and grinding trade war launched against China by the United States, a curious feature of the conflict has already emerged: China will not, for now at least, dip into its traditional armoury of rhetorical bluster and belligerence. That marks a break with usual Communist Party propaganda, and even with its rhetoric of a few weeks ago.

Then, the language was much more uncompromising. And as recently as June, according to the Wall Street Journal, in a meeting with a score of mainly American and European executives, President Xi Jinping promised a bare-knuckle approach in countering President Donald Trump’s punitive tariffs, the first of which, on $34bn of imported Chinese machinery and electronic parts, kicked in on July 6th. “In the West you have a notion that if somebody hits you on the left cheek, you turn the other cheek,” he reportedly said. “In our culture we punch back.”