What started as a tit-for-tat over tariffs between the world’s largest economy and the second-largest in 2018 when President Donald Trump was in the White House escalated into a protracted trade war and is now morphing into a cold war of sorts. There is also a tech war brewing between Washington and Beijing and a simmering financial cold war with the delisting of Chinese companies in the US. There are also efforts by the US and its Western allies to stop China from acquiring sophisticated military technology that can be used in an attack on Taiwan or to help strengthen China’s defence forces.
If you have followed my column over the years, you have probably read a lot about “Splinternet”, which is the decoupling of the Chinese Internet from the US-dominated global Internet, as well as the broader US-China tech war and the ongoing financial cold war between Beijing and Washington.
In the simplest terms, the real battle is all about the decoupling of the US and China whose economies, markets and technology have long been closely intertwined. Over the past two decades, China grew faster than any other in history to become a serious rival of the world’s sole superpower. As the factory to the world, China is also now a key cog in the sprawling global supply chain. Since the 2018 Global Financial Crisis, China and the US have been slowly moving away from each other even though America remains by far China’s biggest market and its reliance on Chinese components, intermediate goods as well as finished products, has grown.
