Alex Lo
Is a trade war a real war, or is it only a metaphor? Going by Chinese state media, the country is drawing inspiration from Mao Zedong’s series of speeches, collectively published as the famous On Protracted War.
In it, the Great Helmsman counsels against both optimism for a quick victory and defeatism. Rather, there is a need for a realistic assessment of the stages that must be reached before a decisive battle can be risked to achieve ultimate victory.
That, of course, means readying for a long drawn-out and arduous struggle – in his case, against the invading Japanese, and in our case, against Donald Trump and his trade warriors.
You can easily see why state-funded commentators love the Maoist rhetoric. After all, President Xi Jinping has repeatedly called on the party to relearn from Mao, but especially through On Protracted War, to find enlightenment and confidence on the way forward.
Beijing clearly wants to portray itself as standing firm and ready to fight to the end against Washington’s “bullying” tariff tactics.
But, instead of following Mao, the two sides may already be practising what the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz teaches in his classic On War.
One way to understand what is actually happening on the trade war front may be to recast the Prussian general’s famous but usually misunderstood statement as “war is negotiations by other means”.
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