China has spent years preparing for this trade war — and for a world no longer dominated by the US. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members A store at a Beijing shopping mall displaying its advertising banner. AP Photo/Andy Wong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What triggered the current U.S.-China trade war and how has China responded?
We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture. That is not a recipe for economic prosperity.
Vice President J.D. Vance defending the Trump administration's tariffs on China hit China squarely below the belt. And China hit back with memes. Cue music. Americans on assembly lines, at sewing machines, in fields, eating chips, drinking coke, looking ill-prepared for factory work, to put it politely, which the memes are not.
China's argument since this trade war began is that America cannot win it. China is tougher, more resilient, and better prepared. On Today Explained, as this trade war escalates, we ask, what if that's true?
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Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we are launching our much-anticipated book club, and we're doing it with Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle, who will introduce their upcoming book, We Can Do Hard Things, Answers to Life's 20 Questions. Plus, we've got some fun and important updates from The W and the NWSL, and of course, we've got a new Are You a Megan or Are You a Sue?
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First came the Liberation Day tariffs and nine days of chaos, market swings, Howard Lutnick trying to explain stuff, maybe even to himself, and frantic attempts to calm things down by pausing the biggest tariffs on most countries. But not on China. Dimitri Sevustopoulos, the U.S.-China correspondent for the Financial Times, picks it up as the trade war roared into last weekend.
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Chapter 2: What confusion has arisen around U.S. tariffs and exemptions on Chinese goods?
On Friday night, the Customs and Border Protection Bureau put out a memo late at night that nobody seemed to see in Washington, but it was floating around in China on Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon, which said that cell phones, smartphones, laptops, computers, certain other kind of consumer electronic devices, and a whole range of goods, which are heavily imported from China,
would be exempt from the tariffs. So the whole world said, OK, fantastic, Donald Trump is backing off. He's seen sense on this. Americans are not going to see massive price rises in their iPhone or whatever other smartphone they use.
But then on Sunday, we had more confusion when Howard Ludnick, the Commerce Secretary, came out on television and said, no, no, no, no, no, we're not taking tariffs off these goods.
Remember, those products are going to be part of the semiconductor sectoral tariffs which are coming.
These different messages have created huge confusion as to what exactly the Trump administration is doing and why the rollout of the tariffs is so chaotic, given that they've had several months to plan how they were going to do this.
Over the weekend, China actually made a move to respond to the tariffs and said it would stop exporting critical minerals. Can you tell us a bit about China's response?
Yes, I mean, China has, as the US does, China has a range of tools that it can employ in a trade war with the US. The kind of the simplest retaliatory move it could take is to put countervailing tariffs on US exports, which it has done. But one of the areas where it essentially has a stranglehold on the global market is is in different kinds of critical minerals, rare earths.
These are metals and minerals which are used for everything from batteries for electric cars to components of weapons and a whole array of products in between. And China essentially is very, very dominant in the processing of these minerals, which means that if China decided to cut off supply to countries or to the world, it would have a massive impact because the U.S.
and its Western allies, Japan, South Korea, and a whole range of countries at the moment are still reliant on China for processing these critical rare earths and critical minerals.
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