Beijing will not back down, I told Foreign Policy Research Institute audience

On Monday, April 7, I was invited to the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), a 70-year-old nonpartisan think tank, to talk in front of an audience with Neysun A. Mahboubi, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow with the FPRI Asia Program as well as Director of the Penn Project on the Future of US-China Relations at the University of Pennsylvania.

The title of the program A Grand Bargain Between the US and China? was finalized less than a month ago, and I was called in at the 11th hour to take the stage. In the hour-long program, which also includes Q&A with the audience, we instead had to talk about the ongoing tariff war.

The FPRI posted the videotaped event on YouTube and generously allowed me to extract the audio and post it as a podcast. Adobe Podcast’s Enhance Speech was used to improve the sound quality in the process.

Basically, I shared my observation that the Chinese response to Washington’s bullying was not at all unexpected and that Beijing would not back down from the extreme pressure.

At the time of this post, President Donald Trump raised the tariff on Chinese imports to 125% on Wednesday, hours after China boosted the duty on American goods to 84%. He also hit pause on the trade war with other countries for 90 days, levying only 10% surcharge in tariffs on them.