Gordon Chang
speaker
524 appearances
9 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 23 May
Gordon Chang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If we want more wars around the world, yeah, let's continue to buy this cheap stuff. But we're Americans and we've got to make sacrifices. And this is a tough message for the American public. I know it's not one that any politician is willing to say, but let's face truth. So many times in the past, we have failed to face reality and we have paid for it.
And sometimes we paid for it in the lives of many Americans. Let's not do this again.
A lot of presidents have let the China trade matters slide, and Trump had the courage to take this on. We hold all the high cards. We're the bigger economy. China is the trade surplus country. They ran a $295.4 billion merchandise trade surplus with us last year. So they've got everything to lose, and we don't.
But Xi Jinping believes that he can intimidate President Trump into surrendering preemptively because they're trying to get Wall Street, C-Suite, Main Street to put pressure on Trump to cave in. I don't think Trump will do that because we know on Wednesday, Trump imposed tariffs of 145% on China. And that's a real demonstration of political will.
I think the Chinese are going to take a long time to come to the table. This is going to be a lot of friction, a lot of tension, but we need to get this done and we need to get this done on our terms.
I think that they understood that Trump reacted to the bond market by the Japanese dumping bonds. So that's one way. But I think ultimately, they realized there's a real danger in this. And that is, the US is going to come to terms with a lot of countries. Japan, South Korea, the EU. That's going to leave China out in the cold.
Because as senior Trump officials have been saying this week, those countries that come to terms with us early are going to get the best deals. And China is sitting on the outside because they can't pick up the phone, which means they're going to be pretty much in trouble. Remember, these guys in Beijing, they're not going to be selling a lot of stuff to the US because of the 145% tariff.
That means they're going to dump their products on other markets. Other markets, they're just not going to accept this flood of Chinese products because they cannot see their own manufacturing sectors being decimated. So China is in a really difficult position because it is now more export dependent than it has ever been.
Yeah, I think there's very little room to maneuver. And the reason is that China's predatory trade policies and its criminal acts, they're inherent in the nature of the Communist Party system. These are the things that have got us upset about China in the first place. These are the things that Beijing cannot negotiate away.
The other thing here is that Xi Jinping has configured the Chinese political system so that only the most hostile answers are considered acceptable. So, the economically rational thing for Xi Jinping to do is to pick up the phone, call Trump, and sort of make a lot of concessions to get a deal.
I mean, Xi Jinping can make concessions and say, I'm never going to honor them, but that would be the rational thing to do, to get Trump to say yes to something. But C can't pick up the phone. And that's because he's boxed himself in.
Xi Jinping has declared the US to be China's enemy. They did that in May 2019 with a landmark editorial in People's Daily, which declared a, quote unquote, people's war on us. That is a phrase which has great resonance in Communist Party history. It's total war. So if you believe that you're in total war with an enemy, that you're in an existential struggle,
How can you make concessions to that enemy? Your position is you've got to defeat them. You've got to destroy them. You can't sort of make nice to them. You can't make big agreements with them.
So I think that Xi Jinping has now sort of put himself in a position where he is only going to accept something where it's clear that the United States has submitted, has gotten on its knees and begged China for an agreement. I don't see Trump doing that. And so, this is going to be very, very difficult for the Chinese regime. And we have to understand that the regime may not survive this.
I've been wrong on timing before, so I'm probably the worst person to ask that question. But I don't think that they can sustain it for too much longer. And there's a couple of reasons. Xi Jinping, because he's turned his back on consumption as being the fundamental basis of the Chinese economy, there's only one way out to rescue an increasingly grim situation, and that is to export more.
China's not growing at the 5.0% pace reported for last year. It may not even be growing at all. But we know the trend is down because we can see price signals that suggest, actually, screen deflation. But even if China were growing at 5.0%, it probably wouldn't be growing fast enough for those guys to pay back debt.
China not only has a problem with Trump at this moment, China not only has a problem with an economy that looks like it's contracting, China has now, it's 2008. In 2008, they did not want to suffer a recession. So they overstimulated their economy. They piled on the debt. And now that debt is just too heavy. So you've got all of these crises hitting at the same time.
And so Xi Jinping, a couple of months ago, he looked like he was going to rule the world. Right now, he's going to be lucky just to wake up alive in the morning.
Just to tie up that one point, I think that they're going to wait too long to sit down with Trump. I think that they are going to try and flood other markets. I don't think that's going to work. I think that Xi Jinping probably is seeing a closing window of opportunity. And this is the way I believe that he's calculating things right now.
He knows that a war would be really, really unpopular with the Chinese people, especially a war on Taiwan. But I think that Xi believes that a war would help him in one very critical way. That is, it would prevent other Communist Party figures from challenging him. So I think it's in his interest for, you know, maintain these provocative activities.
Showing 341–360 of 524 · page 18 of 27
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