The results of Trump’s tariff war against China are effectively out. While the narrative underpinning the tariff war was designed to comfort Western audiences, the tariff war’s failure is unlikely to be reassuring.
The Largest Trade Surplus in Economic History
The Economist argued that China produced excess products, which it sold at low prices locally, and could only make a profit by exporting to Western markets, which created vulnerability. Citing solar panels and Lithium batteries, the media concluded that restrictions on selling these products in Western markets would destabilize the Chinese economy. This view, which was also held by top Western policymakers, including Steve Bessent (as will be seen later), informed Trump’s tariff war. Movers of the trade war believed their tariffs would destabilize China and force it to capitulate to Western Economic domination. However, China’s clinching historic trade surplus despite months of Trump’s Tariff war shows that its manufacturers were profitable and could thrive despite Western restrictions.
Bessent’s Story of Two Imbalanced Economies
The personification of the intellect driving Trump’s tariff wars has been Steve Bessent, the US Secretary of the Treasury, who, after negotiations with the Chinese delegation in May 2025 in Switzerland, stated that China’s economy suffered from “excess” manufacturing capacity and that the US economy was imbalanced due to its large financial side. Bessent, tried to mask the irresponsible financial habits of the US, including quantitative easing, monetizing debts, and imputing figures in its economic calculations as just an imbalance. At the time of these negotiations, the US had slapped over 100% import tariffs on Chinese products and was forcing Western economies to follow suit, believing that Chinese firms would start collapsing due to “involution” as presented by The Economist. Bessent’s call for the US and China to cooperate such that the former takes China’s ‘excess’ manufacturing capacity and the latter takes America’s bad debts and poor financial habits or face higher tariffs was essentially blackmail.
China was hence supposed to shoulder America’s Fiscal expansion and hand over its manufacturing to Washington; failure to which its economy would be ruined through tariffs. If China agreed to the West’s position, it would have passed over some of its manufacturing capacity for high-volume exports such as solar panels and lithium batteries, enforced production inefficiency at home, or raise its prices. Failure to follow these requirements would lead the West to further restrict imports of Chinese products, which some in the West believed would collapse Chinese firms under “involution” as previously described.
About half a year after Trump’s tariffs were imposed in April and Bessent Demands made in May 2025, Chinese manufacturers have not collapsed, but have produced a historic surplus, showing they were not under “involution”. Instead, they have continued to thrive, empowered by domestic efficiency and the ability to diversify export markets. They have withstood numerous tariffs, some of them implemented decades ago, including the draconian ones implemented under Trump. What Western economic intelligentsia framed as excess manufactured products were comfortably absorbed by non-Western markets. The Chinese economy has demonstrated adaptability to global shocks and revealed strategic depth that has upended Western economic aggression.
The reality that the Western Media had repeatedly pushed oversimplified narratives about China’s economy, which have now collapsed, shows the ideological function of these media sources. These sources often massage figures and twist data to create narratives, and can report that low prices in China’s economy, which has a growing surplus, as a problem, while high prices associated with growing debt in the West as worth celebrating. Such narratives are meant to pander to Western citizens while hoping to mislead China to create a replica of the West’s debt-ridded economies that only benefit the elites. These narratives ignore reality, but comfort Western actors by creating an illusion that the Western economic model is stable even when it has not responded to citizens’ needs. The western media repeat unsubstantiated narratives of China’s impending collapse, probably promising its audiences an opportunity to benefit from the spoils that Western governments plan to loot from China in case it collapses, as they did during colonial history.
Trump’s Tariffs and Western media narratives failed to reach their strategic objectives, as they did not reduce China’s competitiveness or make its manufacturers fragile. They only protected a few inefficient Western manufacturers and politicized international trade. Narrations from Bessent and other policymakers collapsed alongside the video narrative from The Economist, undermining the authority of the Western intelligentsia and its media megaphone. While observers in China may dismiss this collapse of Western intellectuals’ repeated projection of China’s downfall as unoriginal, some observers in the Global South are having a rare opportunity to see how Western projections that were historically projected to Africans as infallible are often wishful propaganda. Audiences in the Global South are progressively evaluating economic outcomes based on material realities rather than ideological narratives. Therefore, cheap and reliable solar panels and Lithium batteries, which the West frames as China’s excess production capacity, are viewed by Africans as accessible technology needed to enhance living standards and promote future development. The West’s alarmist commentary about these products is largely ignored in the Global South, where it is progressively taken as additional evidence that Western media exists to serve Western imperialism rather than to present reality.
Trillion Dollar Implications
China’s $ 1 trillion trade surplus shows that the minds behind Trump’s tariff war, including his strategists, ideologues, and media outlets, misjudged China’s production capacity and its resilience. This record surplus, Chinese manufacturers’ resilience, and failure of Western Tariffs to destabilize China’s economy or subjugate it to Western control show that assumptions that guided the West’s economic aggression were flawed. Low prices offered by Chinese manufacturers, their export infrastructure, and integration into the global value chains were not vulnerabilities as presented by the US administration and media sources, but sources of strength.
Also, the media houses that promoted faulty Western assumptions now reckon with a different reality. The warning previously presented by The Economist as an expert analysis has turned out to be a narrative meant to pander to Western elites. Meanwhile, observers from the Global South, after seeing the collapse of projections from Western policymakers and experts increasingly recognize that the West’s creating of narratives does not shape empirical reality.
Simon Chege Ndiritu, is a political observer and research analyst from Africa
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