John Ruich
Appearances
Up First from NPR
What Trump Said Last Night, Trump On Immigration, China Tariff Confidence
Hey, Steve.
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What Trump Said Last Night, Trump On Immigration, China Tariff Confidence
Well, no. Li Cheng's speech was wrapping up as Trump was getting started. So we haven't really seen a Chinese response to Trump's speech yet. The Chinese government responded, though, to the new tariffs by Trump. You know, he ratcheted tariffs on Chinese imports up to 20 percent yesterday.
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What Trump Said Last Night, Trump On Immigration, China Tariff Confidence
They retaliated with their own tariffs on American chicken, wheat, corn, soybeans and such, blacklisted about 15 U.S. companies. The Chinese premier did not mention the U.S. by name in his address. It's the kind of document that's drafted over the course of months, doesn't change with headlines. But he did talk about, quote, an increasingly complex and severe external environment.
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What Trump Said Last Night, Trump On Immigration, China Tariff Confidence
Now, those are words we've heard from Chinese leaders before. And analysts say they're basically code for this confrontational situation they have with the U.S. On that front, Li flagged some concerns that that environment external environment may actually have a greater impact on China going forward.
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What Trump Said Last Night, Trump On Immigration, China Tariff Confidence
Rank-and-file delegates to the National People's Congress didn't seem too worried, though, about the tariffs.
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What Trump Said Last Night, Trump On Immigration, China Tariff Confidence
Yeah, well, we had a chance to talk to a handful of delegates on their way into the opening session today. One of them was Tian Xuan, who's a professor of finance, part of the Shanghai delegation.
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What Trump Said Last Night, Trump On Immigration, China Tariff Confidence
So he told me that China's basically in a better position to handle the tariffs now and to offset them than before. China has a huge domestic market, for instance. It's got comprehensive supply chains. He says the authorities are taking steps to stimulate domestic demand.
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What Trump Said Last Night, Trump On Immigration, China Tariff Confidence
And he says the tariffs are also kind of a motivator for China to promote high tech and to expand relations with other countries. Economists, like you say, say the tariffs will probably start to hurt, especially if they keep going up. But these handpicked delegates to parliament were projecting confidence, as you might expect.
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What Trump Said Last Night, Trump On Immigration, China Tariff Confidence
Well, the premier flagged the risks like that external environment, like sluggish domestic demand. But he also projected some confidence. He set a growth target of around 5 percent this year. It's about the same as last year.
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What Trump Said Last Night, Trump On Immigration, China Tariff Confidence
And to get there, announced some fresh fiscal stimulus, a willingness to pursue more accommodative monetary policy to, you know, increase funding for industries of the future like quantum technology, AI, these type of things.
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What Trump Said Last Night, Trump On Immigration, China Tariff Confidence
Well, one interesting thing we'll be looking out for is that the NPC may pass some legislation that would support and protect private businesses.
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What Trump Said Last Night, Trump On Immigration, China Tariff Confidence
And that's pretty interesting because the leadership here seems to have renewed its interest in these companies as drivers of the economy and innovation, especially after the Chinese company DeepSeek released an advanced AI model in January that shocked the world. NPR's John Ruich with some insights from Beijing.
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Justice Department Firings, Humanitarian Parole Ends, China And AI
Yeah, DeepSeek is a spinoff from a Chinese hedge fund. It was established just two years ago in 2023. And it's based in the eastern city of Hangzhou, which is sort of a tech hub here in China.
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Justice Department Firings, Humanitarian Parole Ends, China And AI
And in a nutshell, what they did was hire a bunch of top-notch engineers and develop new algorithms, basically more efficient ways of training and running artificial intelligence with less computational power.
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Justice Department Firings, Humanitarian Parole Ends, China And AI
Well, the product is said to rival tools from competitors like OpenAI and Google in terms of what it can do, things like analyzing data and solving complex problems. It's impressed a lot of people. It rattled markets.
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Justice Department Firings, Humanitarian Parole Ends, China And AI
And what rattled the markets is the narrative, which comes with some caveats, that DeepSeek basically did it all cheaper, quicker, and with less powerful microprocessors than its big competitors.
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Justice Department Firings, Humanitarian Parole Ends, China And AI
Sure, the first one is around cost. DeepSeek says that it spent under $6 million to make this thing. That's tiny relative to the hundreds of millions of dollars that others are investing, even billions. But analysts say that that low figure is easy to misinterpret because it doesn't include, for instance, the cost of developing various versions from which this latest version was distilled.
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Justice Department Firings, Humanitarian Parole Ends, China And AI
So we really don't know what the total development cost was, how inexpensive it was. The second caveat is It has to do with the hardware, has to do with the chips that are critical to developing AI.
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Justice Department Firings, Humanitarian Parole Ends, China And AI
It's tricky. You know, the chips that really matter for AI are made by NVIDIA, which, by the way, took a massive tumble on the stock market after the deep-seek news. Back in 2022, NVIDIA were told they couldn't sell their best product to China. Of course, some of those chips were already there. Some may have leaked in.
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Justice Department Firings, Humanitarian Parole Ends, China And AI
But they made a slightly downgraded version at the time that they could sell to China legally. That's what DeepSeek says it used to train its latest model. Wow. The Biden administration subsequently decided that those chips were actually too powerful. They banned those ones from being sold to China, too. That was in 2023. A year had passed. The horse was sort of out of the barn.
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Justice Department Firings, Humanitarian Parole Ends, China And AI
Here's Gregory Allen, the director of the Wadwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
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Justice Department Firings, Humanitarian Parole Ends, China And AI
So Alan says that era will end. Chinese companies like DeepSeq will run out of those near cutting edge chips pretty soon or sooner or later. They can't buy new ones because of the export ban. China doesn't have the capability to make anything like them. So yes, they did something pathbreaking here. But China faces a potential worsening computation constraint on the horizon.
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Intelligence Officials Testify, Trump's Auto Tariffs, DOGE Access
I used an appropriate channel to communicate sensitive information. It was permissible to do so. I didn't transfer any classified information.
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Trump's New Tariffs, Global Tariff Reactions, TikTok Deadline
Well, the fallout in markets has been far and wide. You know, some of the countries that are hardest hit by the tariffs and actually that are most dependent on trade with the U.S. are in Asia. And we saw a broad sell off here from Hong Kong and China to South Korea, all the way down to Southeast Asia. Markets were down.
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Trump's New Tariffs, Global Tariff Reactions, TikTok Deadline
Trump put a 24 percent tariff on Japanese goods, which apparently surprised markets there. The Nikkei 225 dropped close to 3 percent today. In Vietnam, which has been a huge beneficiary of U.S.-China trade friction as manufacturers have moved south of the border, Trump hit it with one of the highest tariff rates, 46 percent.
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Trump's New Tariffs, Global Tariff Reactions, TikTok Deadline
And the country's Ho Chi Minh stock index shed nearly 7 percent on the day. In Europe, it seems to be a similar story of selling. You know, economists are recalibrating their expectations now and investors are just nervous.
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Trump's New Tariffs, Global Tariff Reactions, TikTok Deadline
Unhappiness and frustration so far. I mean, many say these tariffs were unwarranted. Here's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia, which got the bare minimum 10%.
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Trump's New Tariffs, Global Tariff Reactions, TikTok Deadline
Britain was hit with the minimum 10% also, but the prime minister's office there expressed some relief that the country wasn't hit with 20% like the EU. Speaking of which, the European Commission president said Europe was open to negotiations but working on countermeasures in case the talks fail.
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Trump's New Tariffs, Global Tariff Reactions, TikTok Deadline
You know, President Trump has signaled that he's open to dealmaking, so many countries are taking these sweeping tariffs as kind of an opening salvo for negotiations. Others are looking at a range of options. You know, Japan, Brazil, China have suggested that tariffs break World Trade Organization rules.
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Trump's New Tariffs, Global Tariff Reactions, TikTok Deadline
Well, the Commerce Ministry issued a statement calling for the removal of these tariffs, and it says protectionism leads nowhere. China's been hammered by tariffs before and was frankly girding for this moment. The across-the-board tariff rate on Chinese imports to the U.S. now is about 54 percent. Trump was talking about 60 percent while he was campaigning, so it's not far off from that.
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Trump's New Tariffs, Global Tariff Reactions, TikTok Deadline
Professor Wu Xinbo of Fudan University in Shanghai thinks China will retaliate once the Trump tariffs take effect in a few days, and then hopefully at some point the two sides can talk.
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Trump's New Tariffs, Global Tariff Reactions, TikTok Deadline
But he thinks China can afford to punch back and then wait for a bit to see if Trump administration feels some heat from all these tariffs. Any sense of how damaging these tariffs will be to these countries? Yeah, I asked Jack Zhang about this. He's a professor at the University of Kansas, and he runs the trade war lab there. He says it kind of all depends.
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Trump's New Tariffs, Global Tariff Reactions, TikTok Deadline
I still hold out a sliver of hope because it depends on how much trade destruction happens, and that depends on how much retaliation we're going to see. You know, a lot of economists think these tariffs are going to be a big global shock anyway and could push, you know, many countries into recession. That is NPR's John Wirtz in Beijing.
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China's Counter-Tariffs; CEOs Respond to Market Uncertainty; Trump's Deportations
Well, it started with those reciprocal tariffs on Liberation Day. Trump imposed tariffs on countries from around the world, of course, and China was hit with a 34% levy. Beijing was less than pleased about it. So two days later, China matched that with a tit-for-tat 34% tariff on U.S. imports. Trump didn't like that. He added 50% on top of it. China responded with 50%. Trump added more.
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China's Counter-Tariffs; CEOs Respond to Market Uncertainty; Trump's Deportations
China responded. So by the end of the week, the base tariff on Chinese imports into the United States was 145 percent. And U.S. products entering China now get hit with a 125 percent tariff. It was a dizzying upward spiral. And these are crippling numbers.
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China's Counter-Tariffs; CEOs Respond to Market Uncertainty; Trump's Deportations
Yeah, there's no end in sight to the acrimony at the moment. But Beijing did something kind of interesting on Friday when they increased tariffs that last time to 125 percent. They said they were done playing the tit for tat game. So with tariffs at that rate, they said U.S. products are no longer competitive in China.
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China's Counter-Tariffs; CEOs Respond to Market Uncertainty; Trump's Deportations
And if Trump continues to raise tariffs on Chinese goods, it would be a, quote, joke. And China just wouldn't match them. Now, China is not going to roll over. Officials in Beijing said they will continue to protect their rights and interests. So perhaps it's a dual signal, you know, restraint on one hand on the tariffs, but also kind of a don't mess with us signal.
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China's Counter-Tariffs; CEOs Respond to Market Uncertainty; Trump's Deportations
Experts do say there does come a point, you know, when raising tariffs further just doesn't do anything. And these tariffs are already sky high. Victor Gao is with the Beijing based think tank, the Center for China and Globalization.
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China's Counter-Tariffs; CEOs Respond to Market Uncertainty; Trump's Deportations
Well, there's a lot of confusion and caution now. Things have been moving at such a high speed. A few weeks ago, your colleague, Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep was here. He went to a city called Yiwu, which is famous for trading, and talked to a woman there named Nicole Zhang, who sells hairpins and claw clips for the hair. We caught up with her.
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China's Counter-Tariffs; CEOs Respond to Market Uncertainty; Trump's Deportations
So she's saying that she had an order from February, which she previously told us was for Target. The deposit still hasn't been paid on that. Everybody's just waiting to see what happens. She's putting on a brave face, though. She thinks this whole thing is going to be temporary.
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China's Counter-Tariffs; CEOs Respond to Market Uncertainty; Trump's Deportations
We don't. It's hard to imagine the world's top two economies not doing trade with each other. Trump says he's willing to talk and that China wants to do a deal but hasn't called him. China says it's open to talks, but they have to be conducted on the basis of mutual respect. And so it's unclear where things go from here. It doesn't seem like conditions are right for talks or a breakthrough.
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China's Counter-Tariffs; CEOs Respond to Market Uncertainty; Trump's Deportations
Maybe it'll take some economic pain from these tariffs before either side decides they want to get together and have these conversations.
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China's Counter-Tariffs; CEOs Respond to Market Uncertainty; Trump's Deportations
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China Tariffs, El Salvador President In DC, Meta Antitrust Trial
Yeah, late on Friday, Customs and Border Protection posted a notice online. It was full of legalese and arcane tariff codes, and what it translated into was no tariffs on mobile phones, computers, memory chips, flat screens, LEDs, stuff like that. This is substantial because electronics account for roughly a quarter of Chinese exports to the U.S.
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China Tariffs, El Salvador President In DC, Meta Antitrust Trial
China's Commerce Ministry responded fairly quickly over the weekend, calling it a small step toward correcting the error of imposing those so-called reciprocal tariffs on China and on other countries.
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China Tariffs, El Salvador President In DC, Meta Antitrust Trial
It was initially, but it doesn't look like it is. You know, Trump's come out on social media to say that nobody's getting off the hook. These products are just moving to a different tariff bucket. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick explained it on Sunday on ABC's This Week.
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China Tariffs, El Salvador President In DC, Meta Antitrust Trial
So he's saying they're exempted from the so-called reciprocal tariffs that Trump announced so that they're sort of off the menu for negotiation. Why? Because they're going to be lumped in with semiconductors under a separate tariff that he says will be announced in the next month or two. And not just on China. And the idea is to force supply chains of those products back to the U.S.
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China Tariffs, El Salvador President In DC, Meta Antitrust Trial
Well, China's been pretty consistent. They've projected defiance throughout this. You know, Trump seems to be waiting for Chinese leader Xi Jinping to pick up the phone and call him. That's not how China operates. It doesn't mean that they're not open to discussion, though. I asked Andy Rothman about this last night here in Beijing.
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China Tariffs, El Salvador President In DC, Meta Antitrust Trial
He advises investors and corporate boards on China, and he's been on a trip here meeting companies and contacts.
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China Tariffs, El Salvador President In DC, Meta Antitrust Trial
Meanwhile, China has taken steps to, you know, gird for these tariffs. One part of that is deepening relations with other countries, in particular neighbors. And it just so happens that Xi Jinping left today on his first overseas trip of the year. OK, now that's interesting. So where is he headed? First stop is Vietnam. He's in Hanoi now.
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China Tariffs, El Salvador President In DC, Meta Antitrust Trial
He heads to Malaysia next for three days and then to Cambodia. The Chinese government's projecting China as sort of an anchor in rough seas, a reliable trading partner. In fact, she had a piece in the Vietnamese Communist Party's mouthpiece newspaper today calling for joint efforts to protect the multilateral trading system and maintain stable supply chains.
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China Tariffs, El Salvador President In DC, Meta Antitrust Trial
But these Southeast Asian countries are in a tough spot. They've all benefited to some extent from the trade friction between the U.S. and China in recent years because manufacturing has moved their way. And also, they are all negotiating or seeking to negotiate with the Trump administration to keep the tariffs off.
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Tariff Fears, Trump Budget Plan Passes House, Deportation Ruling
I keep learning again and again that hope is the right response to the human condition. And I have to learn this over and over again because despair is an incredibly powerful force in my life.