Xi's Tariff Fight Reveals China's Great Divide

While the elites are energised, China's blue-collar workers are feeling anxious.

- Shuli Ren

How does an escalating US-China trade war affect people's well-being? In China, it depends on who you ask.

Some are energised by the fight. Electric-vehicle makers are in hyperdrive, pushing out luxury new models, self-driving features and battery-charging technologies that allow drivers to recharge almost as fast as filling a petrol tank. Instead of selling cars to Americans, the likes of BYD are taking on Tesla in growth regions such as South-east Asia.

There's also talk of an "engineer dividend"—credit to President Xi Jinping for his focus on higher education in sciences. The success of DeepSeek's reasoning model, released in late January, gave rise to a realisation that China is not just a manufacturing powerhouse whose status is being challenged by President Donald Trump's tariffs. Rather, Beijing may have found a fresh growth model. It can grab market share in software services, which the US excels at. Almost every week, Chinese tech firms have been releasing new artificial intelligence models and applications.

In part because of a stock market rebound, luxury home sales in Shanghai are booming. Property markets in tech hubs such as Hangzhou and Shenzhen are also seeing a revival, a welcoming reprieve after a four-year downturn.