It started with China's retaliation against USA farmers, by migrating Chinese soya bean and corn imports towards Brazil, Argentina and Russia. It also mitigated China's exposure to any National Security issues in food imports through such diversification to a few countries, enabling these countries to capitalize on expanding production for the Chinese market. It was a blessing in disguise and a win-win situation for China, Brazil, Argentina and Russia that it would otherwise not have the opportunity to diversify. The effect of this has serious consequences for USA farmers, now not knowing what to grow and finding a market for what they are going to grow. They are moving forward just clutching at straws like a drowning man.
The technology war has done no better, with the first salvo against Huawei, intending to put Huawei out of business by coercing USA doggies to rip off all Huawei equipment. The result was a mess of issues regarding cost, paying for Huawei's patents and developing alternative systems. In the meantime, Huawei just put all this behind and kept running forward with new innovations, a new operating system, making new phones with its own chips and is now even in the business of making high end EVs. What did not kill Huawei has literally made it stronger and better. And it has ignited the Chinese Government to pour enormous subsidies into technology that are reaping benefits, which would otherwise not have happened.
Now, about the tariff war that was supposed to cripple China's manufacturing capacity. Over the last two years, China's trade surplus has broken records, with the trade surplus in 2025 reaching US$1.2 trillion. Does that indicate the success of those tariffs? Trump and his sycophants never look further than his nose, thinking that China relies solely on the USA for its exports. China now has the Global South market all to itself to grow its manufacturing further. The USA and Europe cannot compete against China on everything from EVs to electronics in terms of cost in the Global South. It is the reality, not a fantasy that Trump had been hoping for to break China.
There is now another show being put on the Global stage to showcase the USA taking the lead to form another alliance in rare earth minerals to counter China, with all the doggies lined up with a photoshoot to scare China. They want to make sure that the rare earth that they are producing will have a bottom price selling to each other, trying to entice the doggies to invest in projects to extract and build refining/processing facilities for rare earth. The USA tried to do that in Outer Mongolia and failed miserably.
Nothing has been talked about overcoming environmental issues yet and already very confident of going ahead. No, no, China is not going to do the refining for them for sure and risked being accused of adding environmental pollution of the earth to its name. They can do the polluting of their own country. China's air pollution has been taken care of after years of suffering demonization. China has stopped the import of waste, like plastics, for recycling. Let us just watch the show.
Anonymous
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While the job creation in USA had cratered and job cuts have gone into outer space with more than a hundred thousand layoffs in January 2026, the highest layoffs since 2009, yet the USA stock market seems oblivious to what is happening. In spite of that it is reported that unemployment rate is still low at 4.4%. I cannot make head or tail of the figures.
Is this situation just a fantasy in a parallel world or reality, when people are being rendered jobless and new job creation absent, how are they going to cope? Just play the stock market and get rich without working? That is the playground of the rich as always and bears no relevance to the bottom feeders. When there are people needing two jobs to put food on the table and pay for a roof over their heads, what is happening in the USA is beyond comprehension. The homeless situation is going to escalate going forward and Trump needs a big distraction, over Iran perhaps.
Trade wars are easy to win mantra has been chanted since 2018, but it looks like the only countries winning are China, Brazil, Russia, Argentina and countries in the Global South, notably Africa. Manufacturing has not been moving back into USA as manifested in its massive trade deficit of US$56.8 billion in November, a 94% increase over the previous month. This shows the USA is importing more than it exports, a result that indicates how well its manufacturing sector is doing. Since the trade war in 2018, China and other countries are making alternative deals among themselves, while the USA is content to sit around and gloat about attracting manufacturing back without creating the necessary conditions to walk the talk. Worse still is the constant demonization of Chinese investments, taking issues with National Security and punishing Chinese companies like Tik Tok. It is a case of cutting its nose to spite its face.
Little wonder that some people are saying that China had quietly rooted for Trump to win in 2024, not openly of course, otherwise China would be accused of interfering in the internal affairs of the USA.
If the house of cards does not collapse, just continue to assure the dull of mind that everything is fine.
Every boast that comes out of Trump's mouth is easy. When it comes to reality, it all crumbles into dust.
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