Zanny Minton-Beddoes

But

China is a really interesting case.

And it's, to me, an interesting case of a country that has stood up to President Trump and actually prevailed.

Because if you look at what happened in April, there was a mini war of tariff threats between President Xi and President Trump.

I can't even remember what it went up to, but they threatened retaliatory tariffs and counter-threatened.

And at one point, it looked like they were both going to be well over 100%.

But then, ineffectively, President Trump

chickened out and a deal was struck.

And I think it shows that President Xi and China realized that actually

the US couldn't afford to put the kind of tariffs on China that it wanted to because it just would have hurt consumers too much.

And now if you fast forward to what's happening now, it's now China that is playing hardball with the United States.

Just a few days ago, the Chinese laid out a new set of export controls and licensing requirements on rare earths, which are these kinds of

Base metals that are required and minerals that are required, particularly for computer chips and for the magnets that go into all manner of vehicles and so forth.

And they're also very, very important for the defence industry.

China essentially controls the production of those rare earths.

And it's just announced that it's going to require, you know, essentially a complicated licensing arrangement for anybody to have any access to rare earths.

And it's really flexing its muscles and saying to the United States, we can play at this game of using our economic power.

as a weapon too.

And I think what you're seeing, and the reason that there's a lot of uncertainty about the meeting now, both between the Treasury Secretary and his Chinese counterpart and the President, is that there's a big game of sort of threats and counter threats and chicken going on.

And the