James Kynge

And one of the key aspects of these stratagems is that fighting is always considered a last resort.

And I think that underlines what I was saying about economic development being so crucial to China's sense of statecraft.

And if we apply some of the stratagems to what's happening now between China, Iran, and the US, I think there's a couple of stratagems that actually could do some work to help us understand what's happening.

One of them is called kill with a borrowed knife.

in Chinese.

I'm not saying that China's using Iran to kill the U.S., but I certainly think that it is disadvantaging the U.S.

by its tight relationship with Iran.

And the other stratagem that jumped out at me was Li Dai Tao Jiang, which means sacrifice the plum tree to preserve the peach tree.

And this is basically a sense of sacrificing short-term objectives in order to gain the long-term goal.

In other words, keep your eye on the prize.

And in this regard, I would say that China is sacrificing the short-term objective of being highly critical of the U.S., which is what China really believes in its heart, in order to gain the longer-term objective of getting Trump to come to Beijing and hopefully, in China's eyes, to win some concessions from Trump, maybe some de-escalation in the trade war between China and the U.S.

?

100% agree, Alice.

I think that the BYD phenomenon is a true phenomenon.

I mean, the growth of BYD sales outside China

has just been so rapid.

But I really do think that its impact is only going to grow.

And it's gathering a following wind by, you know, from the crisis, as you described, in Iran, and obviously the rising cost of petrol, gasoline around the world.

But I think the bigger point here is that BYD is just the first of many, or one of the first of many.

A wave of Chinese companies are finding it easier to make money abroad than back in the hyper-competitive Chinese domestic market.