My Take | Donald Trump will make China, not the United States, great again

I bought more Chinese stocks via the Tracker Fund ETF in Hong Kong this week. It’s not because I am particularly wise, brave or knowledgeable about equities – rather the opposite. But then, I realised it was betting against the forecasts of the likes of Benedict Rogers and Gordon Chang. So I have slept like a baby the past few nights.

That’s thanks to commentaries by the two perennial “China must die” diehards, both having been published within two days of each other, in The Telegraph of London. They claim US President Donald Trump’s doubling down on tariffs against China will blow up its economy and end the Xi Jinping regime.

You can guess the paper’s editorial line on China. It also has been reporting and editorialising on the imminent victory of Ukraine, and the collapse of the Russian economy and the Putin regime over the past three years. That’s probably why many people – at least those with a healthy interest in gauging reality rather than fantasising about it – treat mainstream news media with a good deal of scepticism. But I digress.

Given their records of prediction, you’d be better off betting against Rogers and Chang. I wouldn’t even call that contrarianism because both men live in the la la land of Anglo-American anti-Chinese anti-communism.

Trump has paused his tariffs against most countries and focused on China with tariffs adding up to 145 per cent, an effective rate of 156 per cent with the addition of earlier-imposed levies. Beijing has vowed to “fight to the end”. A full-blown trade war between the world’s two largest economies? Who knows?

But those two know.

“Donald Trump has just blown up China’s economy,” wrote Chang, whose 2001 book, The Coming Collapse of China, has long been the undisputed gold standard in how not to make economic and geopolitical predictions. “The [US] president has upended global trade, and left Xi Jinping with nowhere else to go.”