Chinese leader Xi Jinping has been preparing for this moment for years.
In April 2020, long before U.S. President Donald Trump launched a trade war that would shake the global economy, China’s top leader held a meeting with senior Communist Party officials and laid out his vision for turning the tables on the United States in a confrontation.
Tensions between his government and the first Trump administration had been simmering over an earlier round of tariffs and technology restrictions. Things got worse after the emergence of COVID-19, which ground global trade to a halt and exposed how much the United States, and the rest of the world, needed China for everything from surgical masks to pain medicines.
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