In Clashing with China Trump Doesn’t Know Who He’s Dealing With.
Botrugno, Salento, Puglia, Italy, April 9th, 2025.
Salaroche

China has one ultra-important determinant factor in its favor in any confrontation with the United States. The Chinese people are unified in support of their own government, their own sociopolitical system, and their own way of life on a much greater scale than we Americans are. Let me explain to you how it is that I know this.

I lived for one year in the city of Jiayuguan, in the Province of Gansu, Northwestern China, partially bordering Mongolia; for six months in the city of Nanning, in the Province of Guanxi, in Southern China, bordering Vietnam, and for one year in Beijing, the capital. I also spent a few months in a few cities of Guangdong Province, such as Guangzhou, Foshan, and Shenzhen, the latter bordering Hong Kong.

In addition, I also spent a couple of months in the trade-center city of Yiwu, in the Province of Zhejiang, Eastern China, and a few months in a couple of cities on the island/Province of Hainan, namely Sanya and Boao. In total, if we were to put one day after the other, I spent about four years living in China.

While living there, I was able to talk to High School and University teachers and students, to common office workers, and to some regular folks at some cafes and restaurants, and the main trait and predisposition I detected in them was, not only their fierce pride in their country’s achievements of the past three or four decades, but above all their pride in their econo-political system.

A secondary, yet still prominent trait they showed me, was their determination that one day China would dictate to the rest of the world what to do. As part of the latter, they expressed a blind certainty that one day soon China will surpass the United States in every conceivable sense.

What I mean by telling you this is that if the Chinese people know they are under attack from the United Sates they aren’t going to turn against any of their government’s decision even when they know such decisions will inflict some pain on the whole population. The counter-siege mentality is nothing new in Chinese culture.

They have been abused in the past by colonizing powers such as England and Japan and against the latter they waged a war that they finally won in 1945. For that reason, there is still a weighty chip on their shoulders that is very likely already triggering a determination to show the rest of the world that they will no longer tolerate being pushed around and cajoled according to the whims of any foreign power, particularly not the United States.

Now they know they are a world-class industrial power and they know their nuclear and conventional military capabilities are something even the United States has to reckon with. I always thought China needed to be dealt with regarding their unfair trade practices, but not in the stupid way Donald Trump is doing it. Donald Trump simply doesn’t seem to know who and what he’s dealing with in looking down on the Chinese people the way he’s looking down on them now.

I don’t expect the Chinese to ever give in to Trump’s intimidations. The most plausible result of this US-China trade confrontation is that the rest of the world may end up benefiting from better trade terms from the part of China, although that could be a double-edge sword as well, as the Chinese could start dumping their products on the world markets, thereby causing problems of uncertain consequences.

After all is said and done, however, I don’t really blame Donald Trump for the chaos he’s sowing around the world. That is just part of the erratic, irresponsible, self-aggrandizing stupidity that he’s always been well-known for.

In my view, the real culprits in this whole dire planetary situation are those tens of millions of blind, ignorant Americans who voted for him in November of 2024.

The definition for human stupidity hasn’t yet been established so as to know where exactly its boundaries reside, but those Maga Americans have certainly expanded its definition to include large socio-geographical portions of the United States.

May the Universal Forces save the United States of America from itself.

Salaroche