Bloomberg： During my trip to China, I saw a country ready for a protracted trade war.

　　Bloomberg article on June 12, original title: A trip to China, I saw a country preparing for a protracted trade war.

　　President Trump is keen to brag that he used economic weapons to force Mexico to make concessions on immigration. "Tariffs are a great negotiating tool," he said publicly on Tuesday.

　　Now it’s China’s turn to back down, Trump said. But for now, a walk in China will find that Trump’s strategy of "hitting the head" has hit a wall. Trump threatened to raise import tariffs to a painful level. However, through 10 days of communication with China officials, scholars, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, the author saw a country that was rewriting its relations with the United States and preparing to ride out the trade war safely.

　　In the telecom equipment giant at the center of this conflict — — Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., the preparatory work has begun. Last month, the United States called Huawei a threat to national security, blacklisted the company and cut off its contact with suppliers such as Google and Intel. Since then, Trump has suggested that solving the Huawei problem can be part of a larger trade agreement. However, Huawei executives said that they had no contact with the US authorities and did not expect to reach a settlement. Now, they are shifting the supply chain and taking other measures to deal with the protracted war.

　　In an interview organized by the US-China Exchange Foundation, Liang Hua, chairman of Huawei, told visiting American journalists: "We are fully confident to survive." According to Liang Hua, Huawei has been planning to replace American suppliers for more than 10 years.

　　China has launched some major initiatives aimed at promoting innovation and boosting the economy. It also takes measures to help technology companies like Huawei. Last year, Beijing announced that it would exempt software and semiconductor design companies from corporate income tax for two years to help them narrow the technology gap. Last week, the government accelerated the allocation of 5G spectrum to promote the development of this new technology in China, the world’s largest market.

　　Vision Energy, a fan manufacturer, acquired Nissan’s battery business in Tennessee last year. Instead of exporting fans to the United States, the company focused on expanding battery capacity to serve the rapidly developing domestic electric automobile industry. Zhou Jiangong, vice president of the company, said: "We are building a new factory in China at present, because China has a better supply chain than Europe or the United States."

　　In addition, China enterprises are also vigorously promoting efficiency, which may make China a more formidable economic competitor in the long run.

　　In the headquarters of Cambridge Industrial Group, a huge industrial park near Shanghai Institute of Space Propulsion, the aseptic production line is becoming more and more automated. In the past, a production line for assembling Nokia brand switches required 60 workers. Recently, it has been realized that 13 workers and 9 robots work in shifts every 12 hours. By using drones, Vision Energy has reduced the work that used to take three days and laborious to measure the solar panels on the top of the office building to 24 minutes. Similar software is also used in wind farms.

　　"We are a company that is good at change," Zhou said confidently. At the moment, as Trump continues to contain, China looks like a country that is good at change. ▲ (Author Sean Donnan, translated by Qiao Heng)