Amy Hawkins

But nonetheless, he's shown that he's willing to put incredibly high tariffs on Chinese goods, even though that will increase inflation at home and hurt American consumers.

And the other trump card he has is to ban or limit the export of advanced semiconductors to China, such as chips made by NVIDIA in particular, which China needs for its advanced AI ambitions, although China is also trying to build up its domestic industry there so that it's not as reliant on the U.S.

In China, in the past few years, there's been a kind of intensification of securitisation, increased spending on the military, increased spending on technology and AI.

But then the economy as a whole for the average person is doing quite badly.

I mean, unemployment is really high, particularly among young people.

you go to so many kind of smaller cities in China and it's just like boarded up shops, unemployed people, wages are going down.

It's normal as a country transitions from being a developing country into a more like a middle income country for that rate of growth to slow down.

But at the same time, Xi has really pivoted the country to say, like, look, what we need to focus on are these areas of national defence and self-reliance.

And if that means that we don't turn into millionaires overnight, then that's fine.

But he's looking for more kind of long-term stability for the country.

When it comes to the war in Iran, I think it's really proven the benefits of China's approach because in Asia in particular, there's been a huge energy shock.

In the Philippines, in Vietnam, you've seen schools closing, government workers being told to stay home.

You've seen none of that in China.

And that's because China still gets more than half of its energy from domestic coal reserves.

It's built up massive stockpiles of oil.

It has massive renewable energy infrastructure.

China's successes in building out wind and particularly solar.

And that has made China actually very resilient against this energy shock and really kind of proven to the Chinese leaders and the Chinese people the benefits of investing in this critical infrastructure, which could keep China afloat in the event of a war in Asia, for example.

So I think Trump's kind of erratic global foreign policy has just kind of proven to China that they were right to invest heavily in these certain industries, even if it was at the expense of rapid economic growth in other sectors.

Yeah, we're at quite a delicate point of US-China-Taiwan relations.