What does China really think about Trump? They know about humiliation and won't take it from him
Last week, Mao Ning, head of China's foreign ministry information department, posted a blurry black-and-white clip of a moment in history. In 1953, Chairman Mao made a defiant speech of resistance to what he called US aggression in Korea.
Kim Il-sung, the North Korean leader and founder of the Kim dynasty, now in its third generation, had invaded US-backed South Korea. When Kim's attempt to unite Korea by force appeared to be failing, China threw nearly 3 million 'volunteers' into the war and succeeded in fighting to the stalemate that has prevailed ever since.
There was no mistaking the symbolism of the image. As Donald Trump bragged to his acolytes in Washington that foreign leaders were queuing up and 'kissing my ass', Beijing was announcing a 'fight to the end'.
Trump may be about to discover that it is unwise to insult Beijing. The harder he plays it, the harder Beijing will play it back.
This determination to fight to the end is both rooted in China's recent history and in concern for its future. Since the Chinese Communist party turned its guns on protesting students in Tiananmen in 1989, its propaganda has drummed the idea of a 'century of humiliation' into generations of Chinese citizens.
The term is shorthand for the period between the first Opium war (1839-1842) and 1949, when the Communist party won China's civil war. It was a period in which western imperial powers forced the ailing Qing dynasty to make concessions on trade and extraterritorial rights, followed by the collapse of the imperial dynasty and the invasion of China by Japan.
Since 1989, the 'century of humiliation' has been central to the CCP's message of aggrieved nationalism, and the promise to its citizens that the party would make China so rich and powerful that it would never again be bullied by foreign powers.
That promise has substantially been delivered. Globalisation, access to markets and foreign investment triggered three decades of double-digit growth that transformed China from a poverty-stricken rural society to an urbanised industrial power, even if the benefits of growth remain unevenly distributed. No longer the low-wage, low-added-value world factory of the 1990s, today's China commands a lead across a range of advanced technologies and supply chains, including those essential for the energy transition, mid-range technology and defence.
China's challenge now is to negotiate the more difficult waters of continuing growth. The economy is sputtering, the property sector collapse has left provincial governments mired in debt and short of revenue, and the industrial sector is producing far more than the domestic market can consume, despite a decade-long government effort to encourage more spending at home.
Industrial overproduction leads to ferocious cycles of competitive price cutting and growing resistance to what China's trade partners increasingly see as dumping of cut-price goods in international markets. In China, successive shocks to the economy have made citizens anxious about the country's future.But there is another useful thread in China's propaganda that is coming to the aid of its beleaguered leadership: the long-running contest with the US for global power and influence, and the proposition that the US aims to contain China and sabotage its rise.
There is no shortage of evidence to support the thesis: a decade of mounting, bipartisan hostility in Washington; a succession of defence and security reviews that cite China as America's principal strategic threat; restrictions on sales to China of advanced semiconductors to slow its technological advance,; and now Donald Trump's trade war.Economically, the trade war may be bad news for Xi Jinping, but ideologically and politically it is a gift.
In 1989, the student protesters in Tiananmen erected a statue they called the Goddess of Democracy. It was a replica of the Statue of Liberty, and their message to the Chinese leadership could not have been clearer. Today, young Chinese people are flooding digital platforms with satirical TikTok videos of an obese Trump in a dress dancing with Elon Musk, or struggling to assemble goods on a production line.
In recent years, iPhones and Teslas became status symbols for the increasingly well-heeled Chinese middle class. Today, driving a BYD electric car and carrying a Xiaomi mobile phone are as much symbols of national pride in China's technological advance as the troupe of dancing robots that entertained viewers in January's New Year TV spectacular, or news of China's latest space shot.
And if times are hard for China's laid-off workers or job-hunting graduates, Xi can blame Trump and rally the nation to resist this latest round of US aggression.
Hardship created by a government that mishandles the economy is a political problem. Hardship generated by a hostile external power can easily become an asset.
During Trump's first presidency, tariffs and export restrictions spurred China to greater self-reliance and domestic innovation. This latest round will reveal the depth of mutual dependency and how much reciprocal pain each side can inflict on the other.
China's leadership did not choose the fight, but it now believes that there are considerable gains to be made in this deadly contest for global influence. Isabel Hilton is a London-based writer and broadcaster who has reported extensively from China and Hong Kong
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NBC News
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Iranian regime may struggle to recover, but could decide to push for bomb, experts say
Israel's military strikes on Iran have struck at the heart of the country's military leadership and nuclear program, creating a possible vacuum at the top of the regime that could hinder its ability to recover from the onslaught, experts say. But — assuming that it still can — there is a scenario in which the strikes could lead Tehran to abandon negotiations over its nuclear program and instead rush toward building a bomb, according to analysts and former U.S. officials. The killing of top Iranian military officers as well as several nuclear scientists will likely have sparked fears in Tehran that Israeli intelligence had deeply penetrated the regime and that other senior figures could also be in danger. Israel has previously pulled off brazen assassinations inside Iran, targeting senior government scientists involved in the country's nuclear program and the political leader of the Iranian-backed Palestinian group Hamas when he was visiting Tehran. 'You have to assume the system is shell-shocked,' said Alex Vatanka of the Middle East Institute think tank. 'They don't know… how badly they're infiltrated' by Israel. Iranian media and the Israeli military said Israel's strikes on Thursday killed Iran's top military officer, Mohammad Hossein Bagheri, as well as the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Hossein Salami, and a major general in the Revolutionary Guards, Gholam Ali Rashid. The senior military officers targeted had deep ties to Iran's regime and were known personally by the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, particularly Bagheri, according to Vatanka. Khamenei promoted Bagheri to his post as chief of the armed forces in 2016. 'There's a personal element here, which might be a factor in terms of what Khamenei decides to do,' he said. Shahid Beheshti University said five professors were killed in Thursday's attack as well as 'some' family members. Nuclear program's future The first wave of Israeli military strikes launched Thursday likely inflicted serious damage on Iran's nuclear program, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that air raids will continue for 'as many days as it takes' to ensure Iran does not develop a nuclear arsenal. But Iran still has buried nuclear facilities at Fordow and elsewhere that it could potentially use if it chose to pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and rescind its commitment not to pursue nuclear weapons. In that case, Iran would need to enrich uranium to weapon-grade levels, a short technical step with its current stockpile, and then build a nuclear warhead. That effort could take roughly a year or more, most experts estimate. The CIA declined to comment as to whether there were any indications that Iran was moving to pull out of the NPT and pursue nuclear weapons. U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be trying to use the Israeli military attack as leverage over Iran, pushing it to make concessions or else face even harsher military strikes. But Iran may calculate that the time for negotiations is over and opt to build nuclear weapons, according to Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group think tank. 'One of the strategic risks in targeting Iran's nuclear infrastructure is the potential for backlash,' Vaez said. The strikes 'could incentivize Tehran to reconstitute its program with renewed urgency, driven by a heightened resolve to achieve a credible nuclear deterrent,' he said. Iran has invested decades of effort and trillions of dollars in building its nuclear program, and Iranian political leaders portray it as a point of national pride, a symbol of the country's independence and technological progress. Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, said Iran's leadership will likely choose to develop nuclear weapons rather than give up the program it sees as a patriotic endeavor. 'It has become a symbol of national prestige and honor,' Miller said on MSNBC. 'When all is said and done, and this regime stays in power, which I suspect it will, the Iranians will probably make a decision to go all out in an effort to weaponize,' Miller said. 'And the Americans and the Israelis are going to have to figure out, over time, how to deal with it.' Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy national intelligence officer for the Near East at the U.S. National Intelligence Council, said that Iran may conclude that pursuing nuclear weapons is the only way to safeguard the regime. Iran 'may determine that the Israeli strikes mean time is up for the regime to decide whether to obtain a bomb, if it hasn't done so already,' Panikoff, now at the Atlantic Council think tank, wrote in an analysis. 'The conclusion could be that it can no longer sit on the proverbial nuclear fence, and that it has to rush for a bomb or risk never having one.' To many Iranian political leaders, securing a nuclear weapon -- or nuclear weapons capability -- is vital for the survival of the regime itself, he added. But it was unclear if Israel's military strikes could deliver a knock-out blow that would make it impossible for Iran to build nuclear weapons, some experts said. Alex Plitsas, a former senior Pentagon official and a fellow at the Atlantic Council, said it was likely that the Israeli assault, which included sabotage operations, had caused too much damage to Iran's nuclear sites and equipment to enable Iran to rush toward building a bomb. Iran was caught flat-footed by the Israeli attack, even though Israel had sent clear warnings for years and in recent months that it would not tolerate an advancing Iranian nuclear program, Plitsas said. 'The Iranians have misread the signals from Israel again and again,' he said. Even a successful series of strikes against Iran's nuclear sites might only delay Tehran's ability to develop the bomb by up to two years, according to past comments by U.S. officials and estimates by experts. In 2012, Robert Gates, shortly after he stepped down as defense secretary, said military strikes against Iran's nuclear program would likely fail in the end to prevent Tehran from developing the bomb. 'Such an attack would make a nuclear-armed Iran inevitable,' Gates said at the time. 'They would just bury the program deeper and make it more covert.' Iran maintains its nuclear program is designed for purely civilian purposes to generate energy and research, but Western powers have long accused Tehran of laying the ground for a nuclear weapons project, citing enrichment activity far beyond what's required for peaceful uses. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Iran had a nuclear weapons program but halted the project in 2003. A report in May from the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded Iran was not fully cooperating with U.N. inspectors and that the agency could not provide assurance that Iran's nuclear program was 'exclusively peaceful.' On Thursday, the IAEA censured Iran for failing to comply with nonproliferation obligations designed to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. It was the first such censure in 20 years. Democratic lawmakers have criticized Trump for pulling, during his first term, the U.S. out of a 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran that imposed limits on its nuclear activities, saying that decision opened the way to the current crisis.
