Nathan Gardels at Noema writes of the unanticipated consequences of the trade war:
… Keyu Jin, author of “The New China Playbook: Between Socialism and Capitalism,” points out that the tariff war will also result in reshaping China’s industrial structure, likely strengthening it further.
“Technological leaps are rarely born in comfort,” she wrote recently in the Financial Times. “They are forged in conflict, competition and necessity. From nuclear energy to the space race, and now the unfolding artificial intelligence rivalry between the U.S. and China — innovation accelerates when the stakes are highest. … Although China’s most urgent economic challenge remains internal, 145% U.S. tariffs give Beijing a clear pretext to act — to stimulate aggressively, subsidize strategically, sharpen its survival instinct and double down on technological supremacy.
If Washington’s aim is to suppress China’s rise, it’s going about it all wrong. Tariffs don’t just alter trade flows — they redirect resources and reshape industrial structures.”
As we have written before in Noema, most recently with respect to DeepSeek’s open-source AI model that matches the best of American Big Tech, it is a comforting myth in the West that China can’t innovate. As Jin points out, efforts to keep a capable nation like China down don’t so much stymie as stimulate its persistent rise.