‘Negotiate, sure! Fight, anytime! Bully us, wishful thinking!’
That’s the message the China’s Communist Party sent out across the country on Tuesday in an effort to boost its citizens’ morale amid rising trade tensions with the United States, according to a CNBC translation.
Here’s the graphic from the People’s Daily, which was posted on its WeChat account with the headline, “This is the attitude of China!”:
Up to this point, Chinese state media has apparently been reluctant to fire up the propaganda machine over the trade war, but that’s no longer the case this week in the wake of President Trump’s latest push for increased tariffs, as you can see by this Bloomberg chart of “trade war” mentions:
One editorial published by the Xinhua News Agency and the People’s Daily accused the U.S. of “greed and arrogance,” explaining this is a “people’s war” — a phrase introduced by Mao Zedong to describe China’s fight the Japanese.
The piece didn’t call out Trump by name but did say “the trade war in the United States is strongly advocated by one person and one team.”
Related: President Donald Trump says China’s paying for these tariffs, but here’s who is really getting pinched
The rhetoric has also been amplified across state TV, where CCTV anchor Kang Hui, according to CNN, said China would “fight for a new world,” and that “there’s nothing we haven’t seen before.”
Kang, in a clip that has gone viral across Chinese social media, said “the Chinese economy is a sea, not a small pond. A rainstorm can destroy a small pond, but it cannot harm the sea. After numerous storms, the sea is still there.”
The U.S. stock market has been getting hammered with each development on the trade front in the past few sessions, though the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.28% and S&P 500 index SPX, +1.28% are bouncing back in Tuesday’s session. Meanwhile, the Hang Seng Index HSI, -1.50% and the Shanghai Composite SHCOMP, -0.69% both took losses.
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