My New York Times op-ed, a guest essay by Michael Hejtmanek, a translation of an essay on trade war by a famous Chinese blogger

A unique glimpse into how public opinions might be shaped in our era

Last week was great fun for me personally. As someone who occasionally bashes mainstream Western media, it was quite an experience to write at the very heart, the very citadel of mainstream Western media: the New York Times.

Yes, your Robert Wu has officially become someone who has written an opinion for the Times. The essay is (now) titled Trump Has Botched His Tariff War With China.

It is a positively encouraging sign to see an institution like the NYT looking to diversify its voice and to tear down the “ideological monotony”. It shows that my work here at China Translated and

Baiguan - China Insights, Data, Context

, bridging the informational gap, is totally worth it.

But a more cynical and realistic interpretation is that it could just be because a shared hatred of Donald Trump is a unifying force. As one of the very few China-based opinion writers for the NYT, I was waiting for a storm of criticism coming at me. Instead, the reviews and comments I received from NYT readers were overwhelmingly positive. The vibe is really shifting since Trump stepped into the White House again.

The essay itself was very easy to finish, and was essentially an expansion and re-purposing of my Briefing #47. However, the editing process took me 5 days and a few dozen emails back and forth, showing the rigor of the NYT, as well as the pains we took to manage our subtle differences and find the common ground. I won’t go into details since it’s confidential, but I can say that there were many instances where each side would want to emphasize something or de-emphasize something, while the other side disagreed. At times, it almost feels like how two opposing nations try to cut, slice, rephrase, and haggle just to hash out a joint communique satisfactory to both sides.

Another amazing experience was to witness how my own work was recycled by Chinese state media for the domestic audience. My friends joked that I had succeeded at “出口转内销”-exporting to re-import.

The first such reaction was by Global Times, which wrote this piece with my permission. They were very positive about my article. At the end of the article, they also used a good photo of a screenshot of me speaking with

Ginger River Review

’s

Jiang Jiang

and

Beijing Channel

’s

Yang Liu

during one Got China episode.

The article by China Daily, though, was published without notifying me. They used a sensational title, “中国人不怕，中国人能吃苦！” “Chinese people are not afraid! Chinese people can eat bitterness!” Of all the points I made in my opinion piece, they only focused on one point I made about China’s relative resilience to suffer pain and chiku, or “eat bitterness”, compared with the Americans. But it gives the wrong impression that this is the only point I am making, as if the only strength of China is suffering.

Understandably, on the Chinese internet, there are also angry people reacting to this China Daily article. For instance, this one titled “Someone is slandering our intelligence again! He even went to the US to say Chinese people love to eat bitterness!” basically called me a very bad hypocrite. Don’t worry, I am not troubled by this. It is just comical to see yourself somehow held up as a villain.

What’s more comical is that, in my first draft, I didn’t even mention the whole concept about chiku. My thesis centered on China’s low dependence on trade with the US, years of preparation, new policy initiatives, and a unified public opinion against Trump, all of which were seen as China's main strengths. It was actually my NYT editor who first suggested that I mention something about it, to which I agreed.

Can you see the irony here?

Overall, I rate it as an amazing experience. It’s a unique glimpse into how public opinions might be shaped in our era. It’s also a live experience of seeing how your words, once they enter the public domain, will always be manipulated and repurposed by someone else. The NYT wants to “use” me to attack Trump. The Chinese state media would use me as a successful example of Chinese people making a stance in the Western media. Some random people would use a partial view of me to vent their own anger against the state media.

To be sure, it is my choice to be “used” by all of them in this discourse ecosystem, and I consider it a privilege to witness all of these dramas.

A guest response to my NYT op-ed by Michael Hejtmanek

I am also posting a response to my NYT article by Michael Hejtmanek, VP of Consulting for Neudata. Neudata is one of our good business partners at BigOne Lab, but please note that this is Michael's personal opinion and not that of Neudata. He is not speaking on behalf of Neudata on this topic.

After his essay, I will also post a translation of a famous Chinese blogger about his views on why Robert Lighthizer and Michael Pettis are wrong, and what the US should really do, but probably would not be able to do, if the US really wanted to re-industrialize. Keyword: going after corporate profits.

Michael Hejtmanek:

Robert Wu’s editorial rightly captures many of the critical missteps in how the U.S. has approached its trade standoff with China. But it’s worth expanding the lens a bit further.

Yes, China exported $438 billion in goods to the U.S. last year — but that figure doesn’t reflect the full picture. China also exports over $1 trillion in components and raw materials to Asian neighbors, many of which serve as offshore assembly hubs before goods are routed into the U.S. market. That indirect flow is precisely why President Xi’s recent diplomatic tour of Asia was so significant — reinforcing those ties ensures that China’s trade engine continues running, even amid tightening U.S. tariffs.

Meanwhile, the Trump team has opened a second front — this time with Europe — escalating trade tensions with the only natural ally the U.S. might have had in shaping a unified approach to China. Instead of fostering alignment with Brussels, Washington is now risking a transatlantic fracture that plays directly into Xi Jinping’s hands. Alienated by tariffs and tech restrictions, European leaders are increasingly engaging with Beijing on trade, green tech, and AI cooperation. The result? A strategic vacuum that China is more than ready to fill.

Equally perplexing is the U.S. request that Japan, the largest holder of U.S. debt, inflate the value of the yen as a counterweight to China’s export strength, despite Japan having spent decades and trillions trying (unsuccessfully) to weaken its own currency in the face of structural deflation and demographic decline. Asking Japan to reverse-engineer 30 years of monetary policy to fit a U.S. campaign strategy isn’t just unrealistic — it suggests a serious misunderstanding of the economic realities at play.

What’s also missing from much of the U.S. rhetoric is a modern understanding of China itself. Vice President JD Vance recently referred to Chinese citizens as “peasants,” likely unaware that the term in Chinese ("nongmin") refers to farmers and often carries a sense of cultural pride rather than insult. But the bigger issue is what this reveals — many American political voices still misread China through outdated Cold War lenses, ignoring its rise as a complex, technologically advanced, and increasingly self-sufficient economy.

When I worked in Shenzhen at DJI, we took deep pride in being a homegrown Chinese technology company — not an IP thief, but an innovator building world-leading products. DJI’s founder, Frank Wang, is one of the most visionary entrepreneurs I’ve met — not a "peasant," not a proxy of the state, but a technologist who worked with the government to help shift the global perception of Chinese innovation.

The problem isn't that China is stealing — it's that China is now competing at the highest levels. And in many sectors, it's winning. What frustrates some in Washington may be less about unfair trade, and more about the fact that China has found success through a hybrid model of state involvement, capital controls, and long-term planning — a model that challenges conventional Western assumptions.

That said, for China to fully take on global economic leadership, especially as a credible alternative to the U.S.-led Bretton Woods system, it may need to take further steps: offering more transparency, allowing markets to liberalize in key sectors, and giving global businesses greater confidence that commercial decisions can be made independent of state priorities. Until then, China's ambition and momentum are real — but questions around trust and openness remain barriers to full global acceptance.

Robert is right — much of the leverage now sits with Beijing. While China still has internal reforms to pursue if it wants the renminbi to become a true global standard, the momentum is undeniably shifting. If there was ever a moment to rethink assumptions about U.S. economic exceptionalism, this may be it.

The question now isn’t whether America is winning or losing — it’s whether it’s even asking the right questions.

Michael currently lives in New York. He has extensive experience in software, manufacturing, investment, and data space throughout his career, and he has lived / worked in many countries, including the UK, Canada, Sweden, Mexico, and China. His LinkedIn profile can be found here.

Who should Trump really go after to re-industrialize America?

Finally, let me share one of my favorite Chinese bloggers, Mufeng, whom Trump should really look to for re-industrializing America.

The essay is titled:

为什么说川普的智囊开错了药方 Why do I say Trump’s advisors gave the wrong prescription

By Mu Feng

Reflecting on the problems brought about by hyper-globalization is something researchers on both sides of the G2 are doing. On the Chinese mainland side, there's more focus on boosting domestic demand. Researchers' thinking is currently quite unified, with a more profound and down-to-earth understanding compared to the US side, and it's also less extreme. In contrast, the reflection in the US is currently more chaotic, leading to policy confusion.

The author reiterates the premise that hyper-globalization has indeed brought many problems, mainly manifested in two inequalities: inequality between countries and inequality within a country. Therefore, the re-globalization phase actually aims to solve or at least alleviate these two inequalities. [redacted]

The author believes that the main advisors for Trump's second-term policies, represented by Robert Lighthizer and Michael Pettis, have prescribed the wrong remedy for the US's problems.

The long-standing real problem in the US is the issue of internal distribution, which mainly manifests in two aspects:

First, during hyper-globalization, US multinational corporations have massively outsourced their manufacturing segments, while retaining branding and core technology development capabilities (intellectual property) in the US. The entire production process takes place overseas at low costs. This has led to a decreasing number of jobs that the US domestic production sector can offer.

Second, the high degree of liberalization in US healthcare (including commercial health insurance), education, and law, while seemingly generating very high incomes for these service industries, comes at the cost of high expenses for the entire population. This so-called high-end service sector cannot actually absorb a large number of employees, but it has a significant impact on the cost of living for the general public.

Regarding the above problems, the normal solutions should be to tax multinational corporations registered in the US, forcing them to move their overseas production bases back to the US, and to reduce the costs of healthcare and education in the US as much as possible.

However, the US political system and the current political reality make it difficult to implement the aforementioned solutions that target the vested interests in the US. The two parties can only reach consensus when scapegoating foreigners. Since they cannot tax domestic large enterprises or compress the interests of domestic insurance and education sectors, they can only look for alternative solutions.

Trump's advisors believe that the main reason for the US's current problems is not the above, but rather that countries with trade surpluses with the US deliberately depress their exchange rates, thereby gaining a production cost advantage.

Based on the author's long-term reading and thinking on globalization issues, Trump's advisors seem to be excessively focused on the exchange rate issue while neglecting other reasons that have led to the current state of globalization.

Since 2018, the author has consistently argued that, compared to US manufacturing, German and Japanese manufacturing did not lose their identities as much during globalization. Like the US, Germany, and Japan also experienced large-scale industrial outsourcing during globalization, with mainland China becoming their outsourced production base. However, the domestic manufacturing industries in Germany and Japan did not decline like that in the US. In the words of Japanese scholar Itami Takayuki, Japanese companies' globalization is a "pizza-style" globalization, meaning the core part has always been in Japan, and the domestic market has long maintained a certain production capacity. Germany has done something similar. Of course, Japan and Germany are now also experiencing the impact of technological revolutions, which is another issue.

So, is it just an exchange rate problem? Not really. The US underwent a round of proactive and large-scale de-industrialization during globalization, which was its own choice.

Of course, they now regret it, feel it was wrong, and need to restore domestic manufacturing capabilities. But they can't clearly articulate what to restore. Trump's advisors didn't intend to restore low-end and mid-range manufacturing and know it's fundamentally impossible, a point Stephen Miran mentioned in his report. However, for the sake of votes, they can't say this. Instead, they can only promote the idea of even producing shirts domestically. Many Americans themselves find this amusing, and there are many jokes online.

What the US truly hopes to restore is high-value-added, high-end manufacturing with strategic significance, such as advanced semiconductor production, as well as individual industries with traditional advantages, such as automobile manufacturing.

Since politicians dare not tax US multinational corporations to force them to relocate their industries back to the US, yet they want to promote the return of manufacturing, the alternative solution proposed is to impose tariffs. To impose tariffs, they have to go through a convoluted argument that all problems are caused by the trade deficit, and the reason for the problem is that surplus countries are depressing their exchange rates. At this point, they are already "reasoning backward from the result."

Not daring to directly address the domestic problems in the US makes the author feel that the current group of US advisors is very weak, especially the scholars among them who do not hold positions in the Trump administration and have no vested interests. In this situation, they are still disregarding facts and providing obviously wrong and counterproductive solutions, which is truly shameful.

Mainland China often has different voices as well, but the author believes that currently, both within and outside the government, regarding some fundamental issues, the views among researchers tend to be relatively consistent. For example, the emphasis on domestic demand is a basic consensus among both official and market-side researchers, creating a sense of concerted effort. Of course, any reform requires time and opportunity to advance, but there is no confusion in the direction of thought. The situation in the US, where researchers who can influence decision-making deliberately provide absurd ideas, does not exist here.

The author even believes that there is a possibility that Trump's current key advisors may have been frustrated for a long time and hope to make breaking an old world, regardless of whether a new world can be built, their life goal.

Compared to directly taxing US domestic multinational corporations, what are the main problems with imposing tariffs?

First, both types of taxation can actually be used to force the so-called "manufacturing return" because they both significantly harm multinational corporations. Relatively speaking, directly taxing US domestic multinational corporations has lower friction costs. Trump's advisors seem to still be living in the era of the US-Japan trade war, when US production and Japanese production were completely competitive. US multinational corporations had not yet massively outsourced, so the trade war at that time was essentially US companies fighting Japanese companies. But can that be the same today? In today's globalized industrial chain, US domestic production is actually highly dependent on the production bases in mainland China and other surplus countries. Mainland China can claim that much of its production can be completed without importing US products at all, but it is difficult for US production to achieve this. Therefore, imposing tariffs leads to very high friction costs and will directly affect the normal operation of US domestic production. Since the goal is to force large enterprises to relocate their manufacturing departments, why go through tariffs? Isn't direct taxation better? After all, the decision of where to locate production lines is made by the headquarters of multinational corporations, not by their outsourcing companies.

Second, if the US goal is to bring back mid-range and high-end manufacturing, then targeted taxation of some enterprises is sufficient. There is no need to impose tariffs on all categories of products. The US has already abandoned low-end and mid-range products, and the low prices of these products are beneficial for reducing US inflation on daily necessities, which is obviously good for stabilizing US society. A full-scale tariff war will inevitably push up inflation, which in turn gives the Federal Reserve ample reason not to cut interest rates, further exacerbating the pressure on the US debt problem.

Then, besides tariffs, is preventing surplus countries from buying US assets really beneficial to the US? Don't rush, try the tariffs first, and then you can continue to try other things. Anyway, empty talk costs nothing, and Trump will take the blame.

Politicians choose advisors, and advisors also choose politicians. Cao Cao曹操 could use Guo Jia郭嘉, Liu Bei刘备 could use Zhuge Liang诸葛亮, and Sun Quan孙权 could use Zhou Yu周瑜, while Yuan Shao袁绍 could only use Feng Ji逢纪, and Dong Zhuo董卓 could only use Li Ru李儒. [Robert: All are references to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms]

Conversely, how could Guo Jia, Zhuge Liang, and Zhou Yu have stayed with Yuan Shao and Dong Zhuo for even a day?

Of course, even if a US scholar has lived in Beijing for a long time, he probably wouldn't understand these allusions. [Robert: This is non-subtle sarcasm at Michael Pettis. Do you think Pettis understands these cultural references?]