Beijing is quietly dictating the trade war’s next moves as Trump and Xi prepare to meet
The U.S.-China trade war is shifting from a tariff fight to a contest of leverage – and Beijing is quietly setting the tempo. As President Donald Trump raises the volume,...
By Fox News · Fox News
The U.S.-China trade war is shifting from a tariff fight to a contest of leverage – and Beijing is quietly setting the tempo. As President Donald Trump raises the volume, Beijing is adjusting the dials, fine-tuning export controls, critical minerals and supply chains. The move leaves Washington reacting to Beijing’s playbook instead of writing the next move, a dynamic that will hang over Trump’s next encounter with Chinese President Xi Jinping . On Thursday, the two leaders of the world's largest economies are set to meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Busan, South Korea. It will be their first face-to-face meeting since Trump’s return to office. CHINA BLASTS NEW US TRADE CURBS, AS TREASURY SECRETARY NOTES TALKS BACK ON TRACK For Trump, the visit is more than diplomatic choreography, it’s a stage for his economic doctrine. He’s anchored his Washington comeback on the idea of U.S. economic firepower, framing his battle cry around restoring American dominance in global trade and emerging technologies. In doing so, his administration has pressed allies and rivals alike to revisit trade terms, wielding tariffs as both weapon and warning. "There are a lot of arrows in the Chinese quiver," Bryan Burack, a senior policy advisor for China and the Indo-Pacific at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital. "The fact of the matter is that they can literally make more moves than we can. They have more coercive tools to use against us, and they can deploy them easier," Burack added, pointing to U.S. industrial dependencies. "China has been decoupling from us for a long time," Burack said. "So a lot of these moves that look like retaliation are really part of Xi Jinping's long-standing effort to sever dependence on the United States and build self-reliance on critical technologies. Unfortunately, the only way for us to respond is to do the same and that process is painful and excruciating," he added. Clark Packard, a research fellow at t…