People probably don’t realize the stakes at play here and how thankful they should be for China’s unyielding position since “liberation day”. The future of the global order literally rests on it.
Basically they keep repeating almost word-for-word the same thing for 3 weeks:
“Tariff and trade wars have no winners… China doesn’t look for a war but neither are we afraid of it… If the U.S. wants to talk, it should stop threatening and blackmailing [us] and seek dialogue based on equality, respect and mutual benefit. To keep asking for a deal while exerting extreme pressure is not the right way to deal with China and simply will not work.”
Translation: remove the tariffs, approach us as equals, or there will be no deal. Period.
There’s a good case to be made that it is this very consistency in China’s stance that’s: a) emboldening other nations to resist American pressure—not a single country has capitulated to US demands since China took its stand b) forcing the Trump administration to negotiate against itself, exposing the fundamental weakness of bullying as diplomatic strategy
This moment echoes pivotal historical turning points where great power behavior set precedents for decades—like Suez in 1956 or the Cuban Missile Crisis—only with potentially more far-reaching consequences.
Like those watershed events, China’s resistance now sets a precedent that will probably shape international relations for years to come.
If China were to yield, make no mistake about what would follow:
The geopolitical landscape would transform overnight—smaller nations and probably even regional blocs like the EU would read the writing on the wall and fall in line, knowing resistance would be futile against a vindicated America if even China had to yield.
We’d witness American hubris on steroids, with Trump and future administrations validated in their belief that unilateral bullying is effective foreign policy: it would become their blueprint in an even worse way than it already is.
Most disturbing would be the effective end of multipolarity—for what is a ‘pole’ if it can simply be intimidated into compliance? In fact, it would undermine the very concept of sovereignty itself.
While China certainly pursues its own interests, its steadfast position makes it objectively the main bulwark against a pure “might makes right” world.
And as such what’s at play here goes far [beyond] whether China or America “wins” this particular standoff, but whether concepts like sovereignty and multilateralism, can survive.
Paradoxically we’re in a place where if there’s such thing as a “rules-based international order”, China is the last meaningful defender of its core tenets, and the primary check against a dystopian slide toward predatory unilateralism, where sovereignty would become merely ceremonial—a polite fiction maintained at the pleasure of Washington.
Future historians may mark this moment as when the international system either reaffirmed its commitment to sovereign equality or surrendered to the law of the jungle—with China, somewhat unexpectedly, standing as civilization’s last line of defense.