'China will win any trade war with US'

BEIJING/WASHINGTON: China has never surrendered to external pressure and it will win any trade war with the United States, the nation’s state media stressed in the hours after the world’s two top economies targeted each other with planned steep tariffs.

In Washington, US administration officials continued to seek to allay market fears of a trade war, and expressed a willingness to negotiate a resolution with China.

“There is a process here. There’s going to be some back and forth, but there’s also some negotiations,” White House National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said. “I think we are going to get a deal over a period of time,” he said in an interview with Fox Business Network.

The ruling Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper said Beijing’s quick counter-move after Washington announced new tariffs this week had caught the Americans off guard.

“Within 24 hours of the US publishing its list, China drew its sword, and with the same strength and to the same scale, counterattacked quickly, fiercely and with determination,” the paper said in a commentary on Thursday.

“The confidence to know that [China] will win the trade war comes from the scale of [China’s] consumer market,” the paper said, noting that China’s market potential is incomparable to other economies.

Many American consumer product and industrial companies see the Chinese market as a big source for future growth given the continued rise in the number of people joining both the middle class and the wealthier levels of Chinese society.

The United States’ proposed list of $50 billion in duties on Chinese goods is aimed at forcing Beijing to address what Washington says is deeply entrenched theft of US intellectual property and forced technology transfer from American companies.

China hit back within hours with its own threatened tariffs on US imports including soybeans, planes, cars, whiskey and chemicals.

BULLYING TACTICS

Shortly after US President Donald Trump’s administration issued its list, China’s ambassador to the World Trade Organization urged all of the trade body’s members to join with China to counter US trade abuses.

“China’s counter tariffs are a spectacular way of standing up to America’s bullying tactics, not only for itself, but for other countries threatened by the United States’ new trade policies,” the nationalist Global Times said in an editorial on Thursday.

China’s commerce ministry said on Thursday it has initiated a WTO dispute resolution procedure over US tariffs on its imports of steel and aluminum.