When news broke on the afternoon of April 11 that Chinese President Xi Jinping was planning a hastily arranged state visit to Cambodia, Malaysia and Vietnam from April 14 to 18, an accompanying release by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported: “At the invitation of General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee To Lam and President of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam Luong Cuong, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and President Xi Jinping will pay a state visit to Vietnam from April 14 to 15,” in addition to “At the invitation of King of Malaysia His Majesty Sultan Ibrahim and King Norodom Sihamoni of Cambodia, President Xi Jinping will pay a state visit to Malaysia and Cambodia from April 15 to 18.”

In both cases the Chinese equivalent of a press release filed under the diplomatic schedule of the president stressed that the invitations had been made by foreign leaders in Phnom Penh, Kuala Lumpur and Hanoi.

There was no suggestion that China had possibly sought these meetings to bolster regional efforts against Washington’s latest tariff moves.

A week prior, on April 5, when news of US President Donald Trump’s tariff barrage was first starting to make headlines, a release on the same MOFA website by the Chinese government stated: “Recently, the United States has imposed tariffs on all its trading partners, including China, under various pretexts. This severely infringes upon the legitimate rights and interests of all countries, severely violates World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, severely undermines the rules-based multilateral trading system, and severely disrupts the global economic order. The Chinese government strongly condemns and resolutely opposes such a move.”

In the days that followed, a public tit-for-tat issuance of tariffs followed, with the US – at the time of writing – imposing a 145% tariff on the bulk of Chinese imports and Beijing tagging on 125% to US imports.

As the world watches, the two leading economies are slugging it out through threats and counter-threats.

However, back on April 5, Beijing also included the line that “China is an ancient civilisation and a land of propriety and righteousness. The Chinese people value sincerity and good faith. We do not provoke trouble, nor are we intimidated by it. Pressuring and threatening are not the right way in dealing with China.”

It is a comment likely overlooked by many in the US, if seen at all. But it is a comment that should be taken in all sincerity.

China is a land of routine and coordination. Any and all statements by Chinese leaders are prepared weeks in advance, agreed upon, and signed off by senior officials well before being made public. China does not make impulsive decisions. Delivery of these statements at Chinese Communist Party conferences and the like are subsequently a formality at which deals made long before are then revealed to a population of well over 1bn and to the wider world.

Across the Pacific, meanwhile, with a relative loose-cannon rolling around the Oval Office firing off threats willy-nilly, it seems, the US is losing that most crucial aspect of business know-how in Asia – face.

When China says “the United States should go along with the shared aspiration of the peoples of the two countries and the world, and, minding the fundamental interests of the two countries, stop using tariffs as a weapon to suppress China economically and stop undermining the legitimate development rights of the Chinese people” it maintains face, but also plays the ‘developing nation’ card – a concept aimed as much at its own people as at the US.

With 1bn+ Chinese now seeing the US as somehow working to prevent their country from properly establishing itself on the ladder of First World nations alongside the US, neighbouring Japan and Europe, this will be taken as a public insult by hundreds of millions of Chinese, making public opinion in China all the more malleable by the ruling Communist Party. 

In a knock-on effect, many millions more across Asia and the world claiming Chinese heritage could be similarly offended. Many of these people are in the US and looking daily at a president – and vice-president – on TV insulting the very culture they came from: Vice-President Vance’s comment about the US borrowing “money [from] Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture” has already been sharply rebuked in public at home in the US, by Beijing, and across Chinese social media.

That China’s MOFA then said “Economic globalisation is the only way to human progress. The WTO-centred, rules-based multilateral trading system has been critical in promoting global trade, economic growth and sustainable development. Openness and cooperation are a historical trend. The world will not, and should not, return to mutual isolation or fragmentation” should be seen as nothing short of embarrassing to the US; irony aside in that a ruling communist government is pointing this out to the long-time self-appointed leaders of the free world.

To see Beijing then declare that “There are no winners in trade or tariff wars. Protectionism is a dead end. All countries should uphold the principles of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefit. They should practice true multilateralism, jointly oppose all forms of unilateralism and protectionism, and defend the UN-centred international system and the WTO-centred multilateral trading system” would have been comical a few short years ago. 

In a world that has been turned upside down in just a matter of days, though, the famous line from George Orwell’s 1984 comes to mind: “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

Doublethink is a concept that China perfected in the years after WWII and one which it continues to live by today as communism rules over capitalism, while at the same time being a slave to the material world.

The US, meanwhile, has a president with just over three years to go before Americans start looking to the next electoral cycle. And when they do, the same old China will be sitting, watching and waiting to see what comes next – ready, and waiting to deal with it.

That the US has lost face and the respect of billions across Asia goes without saying. As such, with President Trump continuing to poke China with endless talk of tariffs while his number two refers to Chinese as peasants is nothing short of dangerous. That the pair of them look to be sat in an echo-chamber of anti-China hawks pumping out the daily ‘Beijing is getting what it deserves’ rhetoric will not end well for the US, or the wider world. 

Instead the White House would do well to look back at a 1964 comment attributed to Mao Zedong and as quoted by Mao Ning, modern day Spokesperson of Ministry of Foreign Affairs on X recently; The US intimidates certain countries, stopping them from doing business with us. But America is just a paper tiger. Don’t believe its bluff. One poke and it’ll burst!

As such, the question Asia and the rest of the world should be pondering is when, and to what extent, China will eventually poke back … because poke back it will.