Trump lands himself in big trouble with patient China

"A fair prediction is that in between watching golf at the US Masters, playing the game himself, touring the tables and glad-handing the diners at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump has found little time to study Bertrand Russell.

- CHRIS BLACKHURST

This is a pity, since it might pay him and America to absorb the British philosopher’s The Problem of China, published in 1922, if only for this passage alone: “The Chinese nation is the most patient in the world; it thinks of centuries as other nations think of decades. It is essentially indestructible and can afford to wait.”

There is another short phrase in Mandarin that might grab even Donald Trump’s attention, “chi ku”, which literally translates into “eating bitterness” – meaning to suffer without complaint.

It is sayings like this that define China’s culture and approach, as Russell observed. Today, they lie behind Beijing’s strategy towards the dramatic escalation by Trump of the US’s economic rivalry with the world’s most populous nation.

Already, the US president has blinked – or rather, appeared to blink. On Friday, China hit back at Trump’s tariffs by raising the duty on US imports from 84 per cent to 125 per cent. At the weekend, it was revealed that the US was excluding smartphones, computers and other consumer electronics from its own increase. That looked like a climbdown.