Summary
China condemned JD Vance on Tuesday for calling Chinese people “peasants” in a Fox News interview, where he said, “To make it a little more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry labeled the remarks “ignorant and disrespectful.”
The backlash exploded on Chinese social media, garnering 140 million Weibo views.
Critics mocked Vance’s own “hillbilly” background and pointed to China’s advanced tech and infrastructure, highlighting rising tensions amid Trump’s trade war.
“only 15%”? That’s a huge percentage when you look at global trade. In 2023, their next biggest export partner is Hong Kong at 8%, which is now part of China. After that it’s Japan at 5%, followed by South Korea at 4.5%.
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/exports-by-country
The point is, China doesn’t want this trade war at all, and neither do we. Trump and Co. are complete morons that are fucking up the global economy for nonsensical reasons. Yes, other countries can eventually establish new trade deals without the US, and they likely will, but let’s not pretend they all can just bounce back within a few months if these idiotic shenanigans continue.
That use of “only” before “15%” is a serious underestimation in absolute terms, but wholly appropriate when those 15% are relative to the US’s self-inflicted trade damage: it’s still immensely better when 15% of your trade goes to a trading partner which has picked a fight with you than when 100% of your trade goes to trade partners you have picked fights with.
Further, in the last 2 decades or so China has both been growing its internal market (so that its Economy is less dependent on exports) and diversifying the countries they export to, likely in preparation for the death throes of empire as the US falls from its top position, which were entirely expected for decades, as was that they would include some form of trade pressure on its closest adversary.
Absolutely, this is going to hurt China in the short-term (and possibly mid-term, depending on how easy or not is to redirect those exports to other destinations), but the Trump trade war with the World is going to totally fuck up the US and it’s the kind of harm that gets worse the longer these measures remain in place because it will be further eating away at the US brand (so even after the tariffs are removed many customers won’t be coming back) and accelerate the demise of the Reserve Currency status of the USD (which will in turn be reflected in massive inflation as those dollars flood back in and way bigger deficit related problems because the costs of debt servicing will go up when there is little demand for US Dollars abroad).
I wanted EU but the closest breakdown was Europe at 22%. Russia is 3.4% and assuming that’s included in Europe puts it closer to 18.6%.