James Kynge

China is, of course, by far the world's biggest trading nation.

It's a much bigger industrial power than the U.S.

It commands about one third of the world's manufacturing output compared to about one sixth for the U.S.

And of course,

On the other side, the US has a much bigger and more impressive military than China.

But my argument would be, unless you're at war, military strength doesn't really count for that much.

I think that the key inflection point came last year when Trump had to roll back

on the Liberation Day tariffs that he imposed on China.

Now, at that point, for a brief period of time, the US levies on Chinese imports into the US was about 145%.

Then China hit back.

And it said that it was issuing restrictions on exports of critical minerals that U.S.

technology companies and its weapons manufacturers were dependent on.

And within months, the White House had backed down.

It had lowered those tariffs from about 145% to what is currently an average of 47.5%.

And I think that, you know, to my mind at least,

This shows that when it comes to economic power, China is able to weaponize much more persuasive, well, not much more, but somewhat more persuasive power than the US.

We've seen it in the critical minerals, but China could also do it in other

chokehold industries, active pharmaceutical ingredients, batteries, legacy semiconductors, and other items where China controls a massive amount of global production, typically hovering around 70% to 80%.

So I'm not saying that this upper hand that China has will last forever.

Maybe Trump will pull something out of the hat at the summit.