World trade Trump sets his eyes on China

Marxist Analysis · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The article argues that Trump's trade offensive against China is not an aberration of his erratic personality or "America First" rhetoric, but rather a structural response by the entire US and European ruling class to a fundamental shift in the global balance of capitalist competition. The central thesis is that China's transition from low-cost assembly to high-tech production — codified in the "Made in China 2025" strategy — threatens the technological monopoly that has sustained the profitability and geopolitical dominance of the advanced capitalist powers. The bipartisan consensus behind Trump's tariffs, including the EU's willingness to join the anti-China front, reveals that this is a systemic imperative of inter-imperialist rivalry, not a temporary diplomatic spat. The article claims that the underlying driver is the crisis of overaccumulation: the Western ruling classes can no longer afford to tolerate Chinese technological catch-up because their own markets are shrinking, and China cannot serve as the consumer of last resort that they had hoped for after 2008.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis is grounded in the Marxist theory of imperialism as developed by Lenin and Bukharin, updated for the 21st-century conjuncture. It draws on the concept of inter-imperialist rivalry — the notion that as the world market contracts under the pressure of capitalist crisis, the major powers are forced into increasingly sharp conflicts over markets, raw materials, and spheres of influence. The article implicitly deploys the idea of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: the advanced capitalist economies, facing stagnant or declining profitability, seek to defend their monopoly on high-value-added production as a means of extracting super-profits. China's move up the value chain threatens to erode this differential, compressing the profit margins of Western capital. The piece also engages with the theory of uneven and combined development: China's ability to leapfrog technologically, partly through state-directed industrial policy and partly through forced technology transfer, is a classic case of a late-developing capitalist power catching up by borrowing and adapting the innovations of its predecessors. The article's treatment of the 2008 crisis and the subsequent failure of China to act as a locomotive for global demand reflects a Marxist understanding of the limits of Keynesian solutions within a crisis of overaccumulation.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was written in March 2018, at a moment when Trump had just announced tariffs on $60bn of Chinese goods and the EU had signalled willingness to join the US in a joint front against China. The specific data points — China's 68 industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers versus South Korea's 631 and Japan's 303 — illustrate the gap that China is attempting to close. The article references the blocked Broadcom-Qualcomm takeover, the ChemChina-Syngenta and Geely-Volvo acquisitions, and the "Made in China 2025" document as concrete evidence of the technological rivalry. The broader conjuncture is one of deepening capitalist crisis: the post-2008 recovery has been weak and uneven, and the hope that Chinese consumption would pull the West out of stagnation has proven illusory. The article correctly anticipates that trade tensions would not be resolved by a single deal but would recur, as indeed they have — through the 2019-2020 trade war escalation, the Trump-Xi Phase One deal, and the continued decoupling under Biden. The piece also situates the trade war within the domestic pressures facing the Chinese Communist Party: a restive working class, the national question in Xinjiang and Tibet, and the threat of a domestic economic crisis. This is a crucial conjunctural insight — the CCP's aggressive pursuit of export markets is not merely a matter of capitalist ambition but of political survival.

Where the Argument Continues

The article is a relatively early statement of the RCI's analysis of the emerging US-China trade war. The argument is developed further in subsequent IDOM articles, particularly those analysing the 2019-2020 escalation, the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on global supply chains, and the Biden administration's continuation of Trump's tariffs under a different ideological guise. The theoretical framework of inter-imperialist rivalry is elaborated in greater depth in the RCI's writings on the Ukraine war and the broader crisis of global capitalism. The article leaves open the question of how the working class should respond to a trade war — this is taken up in pieces on the need for a socialist alternative to protectionism and the dangers of nationalist solutions. The relationship between the trade war and the internal contradictions of the Chinese economy — particularly the debt bubble and the property crisis — is explored in later analyses of China's economic slowdown. The article also does not fully develop the implications for the labour movement in the US and Europe, a gap filled by Against the Stream episodes on trade union strategy in an era of inter-imperialist conflict.

Connections

The article should be read alongside Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism for the theoretical foundations of inter-imperialist rivalry, and Bukharin's Imperialism and World Economy for the analysis of the world market as a field of conflict between national capitals. Within the IDOM corpus, it connects to articles on the steel and aluminium tariffs (March 2018), the US-China trade war escalation (2019), and the broader crisis of globalisation. The analysis of China's technological catch-up resonates with Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century and his concept of systemic cycles of accumulation, though the article takes a more orthodox Leninist position on the inevitability of conflict. The piece also implicitly engages with the debate on whether China constitutes a "semi-peripheral" or "imperialist" power — a question the RCI has addressed in subsequent theoretical interventions. For a fuller picture of the RCI's analysis of the Chinese economy, readers should consult the articles on China's debt crisis and the property sector collapse.

Key Quotes

1. "The European and US ruling classes are getting increasingly apprehensive about Chinese competition. It is one thing for China to be producing textiles and furniture and assemble electronics, it's quite another for China to be moving to the most high-tech, cutting-edge industries."

2. "What is striking about this particular measure is the unity that Trump has been able to achieve. Democrats, Republicans and the EU all have signed up to this more aggressive stance on China. This is hardly because of Trump's great skill as a diplomat, but rather there is a common front developing."

3. "The Chinese government, for its part, is under increasing pressure from a restive working class, a national question in the west of the country and a looming economic crisis. They are attempting to alleviate some of the social pressure by improving productivity, giving them more room for manoeuvre, and allowing them to develop new industries."

4. "The crisis is pushing the big powers into increasing contradictions. Trump is playing a high-stakes game. A trade war would have disastrous effects on the world economy. Even if the major players manage to patch up a deal this time, it is only a matter of time before the issue resurfaces again."

5. "It became clear, however, that in spite of China's shift to increasing indebtedness and spending, this is not going to solve the crisis. Instead, the ruling classes of the US and Europe are worried that the Chinese will grab some of their shrinking markets."