Breathe
By Sofía Guadarrama Collado
In recent weeks, the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump have dominated global headlines. The narrative - for the most part - has turned against the U.S. president, who has vowed to rescue his country's economy from the clutches of China.
The strategy consists of:
- Raise billions of dollars through tariffs and reduce the federal debt ($37 trillion) and refinance it. This week, President Donald Trump reported that, with the new tariffs they are raising approximately $2 billion per day.
- Forcing the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.
- Reduce mortgage costs.
- To burst the markets, even if it affects the United States, in order to bend the rulers of the countries and force them to negotiate.
- But mainly that they peg their currencies to the dollar and buy from the United States and not from China.
To many, Donald Trump is running amok. The reality is that he is not. Mind you, he is desperate to save his country from the Asian giant.
One hundred years ago, China was emerging from what was called the century of humiliation. Then came the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, which plunged its citizens into misery.
Until 1970, China was an impoverished and isolated agricultural economy. People lived in mud houses and thatched roofs. They had no televisions or refrigerators. A person who owned a bicycle was considered rich. China was so poor that more than 700,000 Chinese attempted to swim across the Zhū Jiāng River to Hong Kong, then a British colony, where they could earn a hundred times more than in Canton or Dongguan in southern China. Only 140,000 made it across.
Then Deng Xiaoping, who was never head of state, entered the political scene. Born in 1904, in Sichuan, China, Deng Xiaoping became China's de facto Supreme Leader in 1978 until the 1990s.
Deng Xiaoping lived in France, between 1920 and 1925, when he was young, working in locomotive, metallurgy and rubber factories, which opened the world panorama to him, which most Chinese were unaware of, as the government propaganda assured the Chinese that life in the West was terrible. Although he lived in France, he did not enjoy luxuries, which taught him a great lesson about capitalism. He then adopted Marxism-Leninism as a guide to transform China.
In 1926, he traveled to the Soviet Union to study at Sun Yat-sen University for Eastern workers.
Upon his return to China, he began his career in the Chinese Communist Party. However, his political growth was very complicated, because in the 1950s he dared to criticize the policies of Mao Zedong, who accused him of being an "infiltrated capitalist", dismissed him from his position, exiled him from the party and sent him to work in a factory in Jiangxi, repairing tractors. Nevertheless, Deng maintained his loyalty to the party.
In 1976, Mao died and was succeeded by Hua Guofeng, but Deng returned to politics and became head of the party and the de facto leader of China, although he did not formally hold the top positions. He ruled from the shadows, but with full authority.
Deng Xiaoping - yes, the man responsible for the violent suppression of the student protests in Tiananmen Square - became the architect of modern China: he pushed for reforms in education and science. In 1977, the first university entrance exams were implemented. 5.7 million applied and only less than 5% were admitted.
He also reformed the legal system and the system of government; dismantled the rural communes; allowed individual farming; authorized private businesses; attracted foreign investment; opened special economic zones; and pushed through economic reforms that transformed China from a closed communist economy to a mixture of socialism with market capitalism with strategic state planning. In other words: a dictatorship with economic openness. He convinced the party of the importance of entering the global market with the phrase: "It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." They created collective leadership.
In the 1980s, the policy of reform and openness was implemented. Private enterprise was allowed to flourish. Street micro-businesses were able to formalize by becoming million-dollar enterprises. In the 1990s, China sent more than 200,000 students to universities in the United States, with the risk that they would not return.
Deng Xiaoping died in 1997 at the age of 92. Then, Jiang Zemin was appointed General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and in 2001 he was in charge of integrating his country into the World Trade Organization (WTO), with which China became the "world's factory", with inexplicably low costs. And of course, the world turned to Chinese factories.
Hu Jintao's government, from 2002 to 2012, invested in talent development, the creation of high-level universities, infrastructure, urbanization, transportation, highways, high-speed trains, ports, energy (hydroelectric plants, nuclear plants and the creation of new cities and state support for technology companies and private companies under state supervision.
China is no longer a poor country and its population has become middle class with high levels of education. The chaotic China where motorists ran stop lights and shouted at each other was a thing of the past.
"It is not man's consciousness that determines his being, but, on the contrary, it is his social being that determines his consciousness," Karl Marx.
China went from being a manufacturing country to a middle and upper class country. GDP multiplied in forty years. In 1985, China's Gross Domestic Product was approximately 309,842 million US dollars. In 2024, it was approximately 18.3 trillion US dollars. In 2024, the Gross Domestic Product of the United States was approximately 29.18 trillion U.S. dollars.
In March 2018, Xi Jinping changed China's constitution, to become president for life, and not only that, he holds the positions of China's royal leader, President of the People's Republic of China, Chairman of the Central Military Commission and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.
Today China is no longer interested in importing technology from foreign companies. It now focuses on developing its own technology.
In 1949, when the People's Republic of China was founded, the railway network was approximately 22,000 kilometers long. In 1985, it was approximately 55,000 kilometers. In 2024, it reached a total length of 162,000 kilometers. 48,000 kilometers corresponded to high-speed lines.
China has embarked on an ideological war in which it intends to expand communism throughout the world. With "the new silk road", with which it intends to create a new continent, "Eurasia", and accelerate Chinese trade in record time, by means of the construction of transportation routes on railways from China, through Asia to Europe and Africa; and by sea to Latin America. It is also lending to more than 60 countries or investing in infrastructure.
It plans to create a new world order: starting with the creation of a great global unity and its own summits: the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, the China-Central Asia Summit and the China-Africa Summit.
Xi Jinping presents himself as the defender of the African peoples. He promotes his political model called "the Chinese solution", whose banner promotes the right to economic development. African countries that for centuries were oppressed and exploited by Europeans and North Americans are now being helped (and exploited) by China. So far in his government, Xi Jinping has established economic agreements or alliances with more than 150 countries, reflecting his strategy to expand his economic and diplomatic influence globally. He has set out to surpass the military power of the United States by the year 2049.
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