I recently read 4 articles about China
“ America, China and the Evolving New World Order ” (TIME)
Washington views Beijing's parallel institutional networks and tech alternatives as a direct challenge to the US-led global architecture.
https://time.com/article/2026/09/24/america-china-trump-xi-jinping-global-order/?hl=en-CA
“ The EU and China: An Inevitable Showdown ” (IP Quarterly)
European economic security measures are escalating in response to diverging industrial capacities and protectionist friction”.
https://ip-quarterly.com/en/eu-and-china-inevitable-showdown?hl=en-CA
EU Accuses China of Seeking to Reshape Global Order in Stark New Strategy Paper (The Star / South China Morning Post)
Brussels' updated strategy paper explicitly accuses Beijing of attempting to rewrite global rules to match its political model.
https://www.thestar.com.my/aseanplus/aseanplus-news/2026/07/25/eu-accuses-china-of-seeking-to-reshape-global-order-in-stark-new?hl=en-CA
“ China and the EU: The Imminent Choice Between a Trade Deal and a Trade War ” (Friends of Europe / German Marshall Fund)
Deep structural trade imbalances and state-backed industrial policies are driving Europe toward stricter trade defense instruments.
https://www.gmfus.org/news/china-and-eu-imminent-choice-between-trade-deal-and-trade-war?hl=en-CA
The first two articles above, were somewhat balanced indicating that the dynamics of change are creating friction between the old and the emerging world. The second two were calls to arms by the former colonial powers to confront China.
What they all shared is a blindness to the historical realities that has led to this point. The fact that US and EU companies weren't coerced into going to China. They followed their mandates of maximizing shareholder value by relocating their industries to Asia. They abandoned low margin businesses to chase higher margins, and bigger bonuses. Now, tied to a global supply chain they helped create, which makes them less able to compete, the US and EU blame not themselves or the business mandate that accelerated their manufacturing decline, but the “other”, in this case China. Embarking on a series of self pitying rationalizations that paint themselves as the victims, and China as the perpetrator, while waving the flag of an international order they created but don't follow.
It is a striking hypocrisy. Washington and Brussels demand that China obey the "rules-based order", while they simultaneously expand tariffs, export controls, and industrial protections to constrain Chinese companies and technology.
The record since 2024 is clear:
United States
May 2024: Tariffs were raised sharply on Chinese EVs (100%), semiconductors (50%), solar cells (50%), and batteries, steel, and aluminum (25%).
December 2024: Tariff increases reached 50% on tungsten, wafers, and polysilicon. Concurrently, export controls expanded across 24 semiconductor categories, adding 140 Chinese entities to the Entity List.
2025: Washington tightened restrictions further on advanced semiconductors, AI computing, and semiconductor manufacturing.
Since then numerous tariffs, trade sanctions, and black lists, to which Beijing has responded.
European Union
October 2024: Definitive countervailing duties of 17% to 35% were imposed on Chinese EVs.
2024: The European Commission launched a record 33 trade-defence investigations, ending the year with 199 active measures.
March 2025: EU steel safeguards were tightened, cutting tariff-free liberalization from 1% to 0.1%.
2025: Chinese firms were excluded from certain EU medical-device procurements above €5 million.
2026: Brussels continued expanding anti-dumping and safeguard measures on industrial imports.
This is a vocabulary of double standards. One where when China dares respond the self righteous anger is palpable.
This does not justify every Chinese trade practice; rather, it highlights a profound asymmetry in how identical actions are labeled depending on who performs them:
Market restrictions are economic coercion when done by China, but national security when done by the West.
State support for key and evolving industries is “state capitalism” in China, but subsidies for agriculture, AI, and Boeing in Washington is “industrial policy”.
Globally competitive manufacturing is overcapacity for China, but about resilience when Western companies aren't competitive.
Retaliation is cast as weaponizing trade when it comes from Beijing, but defending the international order when it is imposed by the West.
This is hierarchy dressed as principle, a return to colonial arrogance: when powerful states defined the rules while others were expected to obey them. The modern vocabulary—de-risking, economic security, level playing field, rules-based order—masks the same old premise where Western capitals decide legitimate behavior.
The only new part is the “victim” narrative, where the governments imposing trade restrictions complain of being the victims of the world they victimized. The feeling that turns into self righteous anger when a former minion, like China dares to respond.
The moral and intellectual blindness is staggering. Rules that apply selectively are not rules at all, but instruments of power. As the Global South increasingly rejects a system of universal Western principles coupled with self-serving exceptions, the choice is clear: if Washington and Brussels want China or any other country to honor its commitments, they must honor theirs, reject hypocrisy, expel those who won't abide by the rules as set by a truly inclusive world order, not one where the agenda is set by a few, accept genuine market competition, accept differential economic conditions and needs, resurrect and strengthen international bodies like the WTO, and acknowledge and abide by the principle that international rules apply to all.
My efforts were aimed a creating an economic picture for a client, of the logical political and related economic risk factors until January 2028, given the end of the trade truce. How this will dampen investment by increasing uncertainties in heavy industry, manufacturing, services, logistics and AI.
- Heavy Industry
- Capital expenditure paralysis due to unpredictable tariff cliffs on raw materials and foundational metals.
- Supply chain fragmentation in sourcing critical mineral inputs, rare earths, coking coal, nickle, and other alloy components.
- Asset misallocation risks from building redundant production facilities across fractured regional jurisdictions.
- Margin erosion driven by sudden imposition of anti-dumping duties, countervailing measures on structural inputs and logistics.
- Manufacturing
- Production footprint instability resulting from rapid regulatory shifts and shifting geopolitical alignments.
- Component procurement volatility turning just-in-time inventory management into high-risk speculation.
- Cost surges from forced supplier substitution under sudden export control and blacklist expansions.
- Design and re-tooling bottlenecks caused by fractured technical standards and different regime compliance requirements.
- Services
- Cross-border data flow restrictions disrupting multinational financial, legal, and consulting operations.
- Licensing freezes and sudden regulatory audits targeting foreign firms as part of a system of political retaliations.
- Talent mobility friction and visa tightening driven by heightened national security concerns.
- Revenue contraction from corporate clients delaying strategic investments and advisory engagements.
- Logistics
- Route rerouting overhead and custom clearance delays triggered by sudden trade sanction enforcement, increasing costs and time.
- Fleet utilization inefficiencies and imbalances driven by fragmented bilateral trade flows and trade chokepoint reliability.
- Port congestion and compliance gridlock from overlapping inspection mandates and origin-tracing rules.
- Insurance premium spikes and cargo underwriting exclusions for lanes exposed to geopolitical flashpoints.
- AI
- Compute infrastructure fragmentation caused by sweeping export controls on advanced semiconductors and specialized hardware increasing costs while decreasing efficiency.
- Decoupling of foundational software ecosystems, open-source repositories, and collaborative research frameworks.
- A Gordian Knot of compliance nightmares in order to train cross-border models under conflicting data sovereignty and algorithmic governance laws.
- R&D redundancy forcing duplicate investments into parallel domestic tech stacks and localized hardware supply chains.
The Architecture of Hypocrisy
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at AsianNarratives.