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You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Xi Is Ratcheting Up China’s Pain Threshold

Xi Is Ratcheting Up China’s Pain Threshold

April 24, 2025 at 6:56 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“As President Trump tries to play hardball in his trade war with Xi Jinping, he faces an adversary who has armed China to play a long and potentially painful game in its contest with the U.S,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“In the weeks since the U.S. president first slapped sky-high tariffs on China, Beijing has responded with defiance. A spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry posted on X footage from 1953 of Mao Zedong promising to fight to the end against U.S.-led forces in the Korean War. ‘We are Chinese,’ she wrote. ‘We don’t back down.’”

“The Mao post and other messages from Beijing highlight what China sees as one of its core advantages against the U.S.: While Trump and his Republican backers are vulnerable to the whims of American voters, the party that Mao built is deeply entrenched, having maintained power through more than seven decades despite war, famine, political upheaval and financial crises.”

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Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.

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