China Is Building a Post-US Order with Help from Trump’s Tariffs

The ideological struggle between capitalist imperialist hegemony and the global working class is evolving, with a concentrated realization by many Americans that the current system is fundamentally irreconcilable, and that the blowback from the Trump administration’s aggressive tariff rollout will heighten economic instability. Despite Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller describing their reciprocal tariff scheme as “the greatest economic master strategy from an American President in history,” key pillars of the US financial market are now facing industrial decline. Despite Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement of blanket tariffs, the administration’s China derangement sent global markets into a downward spiral, and the United States now stands on the economic cliff’s edge, with no American manufacturing revival in sight.

Historian and journalist Vijay Prashad argues that this tariff war could usher in a new economic order—one which has already had its foundations laid due to US dominance in the global market—and has already led to an increase of trade across the Global South. Prashad explains that the US government also been placing increased pressure on China through its tariffs and sanctions, thereby causing China to pivot away from the US market: “Seeing sections of its import and exports, for instance in telecommunications, not being allowed into Europe, not being allowed into the United States—so China has also pivoted away from US control institutions.”

Prashad argues that while Trump may be angry about de-dollarization, the reality is that this de-dollarization is only happening because the United States continues to use the dollar as a political weapon, which is sending countries off in search of other ways to trade with one another. “In that sense, the United States is actually the great driver of de-dollarization, not the BRICS countries,” Prashad explains. The Trump administration understands that China poses a direct threat to the United States tech industry, which challenges US capitalism; “the United States is using tariffs to put pressure on China and then using its military to intimidate China. [But] it’s not going to work. China has said they will not enter another century of humiliation. None of the countries of the Global South are ready to be humiliated again.”

Amanda Yee, a journalist and activist based out of Brooklyn who co-hosts The China Report, argues that China will take a hit from the Trump administration’s tariff war, but that it will survive due to China’s long-term planning. “They will weather these tariffs far better than the US will. Since China’s economy took a hit during COVID, they have been relying more and more on a strategy of what they call ‘dual circulation,’ or focusing more and more on the domestic market and demand, and less on export-oriented development, which may be vulnerable to external fluctuations and instability.”

Yee explains that the Trump administration’s attempts to weaken China economically have backfired; from the TikTok ban, which drove users to migrate to Xiaohongshu, thereby sparking what Yee describes as “an unprecedented cultural exchange between Americans and Chinese people,” to the creation of DeepSeek AI, which was developed by Chinese engineers due to US export controls on advanced semiconductor chips “[which] forced Chinese engineers to think outside of the box and use their resources to build a LLM using less advanced chips” leading to a model “that runs on par with Open AI but at the fraction of the cost.”

In the end, Yee says, “these tariffs will backfire too, as other countries will find ways to reorient their economies around US trade, to increase trade with other countries such as China. This tariff war will likely also lead to new alliances led by China, all of which is to say, the US is not only shooting itself in the foot, but this tariff policy will result in us isolating ourselves from the rest of the world.”