On TikTok, there’s only one winner from Trump’s tariff death spiral with China

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Singapore: Just as Beijing and Washington appeared to settle into their trade war trenches, as head-spinning tariff hikes gave way to a protracted stand-off, we saw the first signs this week of the Trump team’s retreat from the precipice.

The US president mused that the “very high” tariff on Chinese imports could “come down substantially” and suggested a “fair deal with China” was in the offing, while The Wall Street Journal reported an unnamed White House official saying the levies could be slashed to between 50 and 65 per cent.

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping’s scuffle over tariffs is playing out on social media.Credit: Nathan Perri

But just as quickly as the potential off-ramp appeared, the Trump administration walked it back. US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent clarified that while the status quo – 145 per cent on Chinese products and 125 per cent on US products – was unsustainable for both sides, Donald Trump wasn’t offering to remove duties on Chinese imports on a unilateral basis.

And so the pathway to the negotiating table for a deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping remains as unclear as ever.

Meanwhile, in the other important theatre of any war – the campaign for the hearts and minds of people who will bear the economic brunt of the conflict – Beijing appears to have the edge.

The digitally savvy generations don’t much care if the trade war is televised. Over on Chinese-owned TikTok, where 40 per cent of Americans aged under 30 get their news, Trump’s tariff death spiral with China has been universally mocked and meme-ified for weeks. Trends have taken hold, tapping into American anxieties about the cost of sky-high tariffs to the average consumer.

The video platform has been so awash with trade war content – much of it broadly unfavourable to America and running counter to Washington’s narrative – it has gifted Beijing the kind of PR win that its traditionally clunky propaganda efforts could only hope to achieve.

For the China hawks in Washington already harbouring concerns about the potential for TikTok to be used as a propaganda tool to manipulate Western minds, the past few weeks have surely been a rough ride.

First came the AI-generated videos depicting Americans working in sweatshops, which went viral on Chinese social media sites before sweeping across the mainstream internet. Since then, it’s been open slather, with many US users joining in the jibes at their expense.

In one nine-second TikTok video that has had more than 25 million views, a young baseball cap-wearing Chinese man, seemingly sitting inside his home, speaks directly to an American audience.

“Hello from China,” he says, his modest kitchen visible in the background. “Let me show you the United States’ products in my home.

“Nothing,” he says, holding up his empty palms to the camera, before adding with a smirk: “Do you have something from China in your home?”

It’s possible that Beijing has nailed the art of an effective social media influence campaign masquerading as organic creator content. Or it was simply the handiwork of a patriotic Chinese netizen equipped with a camera phone and a VPN to overcome the firewall that otherwise blocks Chinese citizens from accessing TikTok.

Americans need only cast their gazes around their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens to see the numerous Chinese-made appliances and gadgets that will be subject to a 145 per cent tariff.

In another viral trend that took off in the aftermath of Trump’s tariff barrage, Chinese factory workers and shopping agents flooded TikTok with videos spruiking cut-price handbags and fashion dupes that they claimed were made in the same factories as well-known Western brands such as lululemon, Nike and Hermes. The only thing missing was the label, or so the sales pitch went.

Their videos, which appealed to Americans to buy directly from Chinese manufacturers to cut out middlemen and avoid brand mark-ups to mitigate the tariff impact, quickly notched millions of views and left luxury brands scrambling to reject claims their goods were made in China.

The Trump administration’s message about bringing manufacturing jobs back to US soil and buying American-made was lost in the scramble for a bargain deal, however too-good-to-be-true it probably was.

At the same time, Beijing has been pumping out propaganda through its traditional avenue of state media mouthpieces, where editorials have boasted of China’s resolve in standing up to Trump. On Facebook and X, Chinese diplomats have shared archival footage of Mao Zedong speaking in 1953, when China and the US were on opposite sides of the Korean War.

“No matter how long this war is going to last, we’ll never yield. We’ll fight until we completely triumph,” the former leader says in one clip.

China’s system of ruthlessly controlled media and internet censorship makes it difficult to judge how effectively these patriotic appeals have resonated with the masses. But seasoned China analysts say Beijing has used the crisis to paper over its own policy missteps that have failed to lift the country out of an economic malaise that was dogging it before the trade war kicked off. Armed now with a victim narrative, Beijing has tapped into a nationalism that redirects blame towards the US.

“The mood has changed dramatically [in China],” Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, says on a recent podcast.

“[They are] seeing this as an existential crisis. The Chinese are actually pretty unified, and they are going to hold the line as long as they absolutely need to.”

Trump, on the other hand, must stare down not only China, but increasingly jumpy Wall Street investors, and an already deeply polarised society whose algorithms are dishing up relentless reminders of the financial hit coming to their pockets.

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