Surviving the shocks: what China and the US learned from 2025’s trade war
Businesses and officials faced a year of disruption – and in some cases, resilience – as tariffs and export controls roiled global markets
It has been a turbulent year for the fraught US-China relationship. In the second story in this new series, we look back at the events of 2025, examining how the trade war tested policymakers and firms, forcing a rethink in business, strategy and supply chains.
In April, when US President Donald Trump upended global trade by announcing “reciprocal tariffs” on almost all the country’s trading partners, officials in eastern China’s Ningbo – a national export hub – went on a wartime footing.
By autumn, however, officials in Ningbo, a port city in Zhejiang province, were reasonably confident that they had passed the trade war’s stress tests. Executives at Polaris Rare Earth Materials in the US city of Indianapolis also felt slightly calmer, even as they weighed their options amid a volatile environment – underscoring how individuals and firms have felt the pain.