China has hit back hard against Donald Trump‘s “bullying” tariffs, raising fears that the escalating trade war could trigger a global recession and prompting fresh turmoil in financial markets.

Beijing retaliated on Friday with punitive 34% additional tariffs on all goods imported from the US – mirroring the US decision and exacerbating a sell-off on global stock markets.

Almost $5tn (£4tn) has been wiped off the value of global stock markets since Trump‘s Rose Garden address on Wednesday evening, analysts calculated.

The dramatic escalation in trade hostilities between the world‘s two largest economies magnified concerns among investors about the risks to global growth.

Published: April 13, 2025

Host Piya Chattopadhyay speaks with trade expert Carlo Dade and political economy associate professor Gregory Chin about the week's global trade turmoil and China's role within it, author Maggie Jackson explores what science says about the impacts and potential upside of uncertainty, four Canadians share what's driving their decisions in the federal election, and Pete Mitton considers the meaning, power and pitfalls of Canadian pride.

China and the US don‘t often see eye to eye, but for decades, they have broadly agreed that it is better to be trade partners than trade enemies.

That alliance is now hanging by a thread. And the real-world collateral damage is already piling up.

Without some kind of retrenchment, US-China trade is expected to fall by more than 80% — a magnitude “tantamount to a decoupling,” said Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, which issued a similarly grim report on global trade Wednesday. (The upshot: Pre-Trump tariffs, global trade was penciled in to grow 2.7% this year. Now, it‘s expected to shrink 0.2%.)

“There isn‘t a modern experience for how to think about this,” Powell said at an event hosted by the Economic Club of Chicago on Wednesday.

China‘s President Xi Jinping has arrived in Malaysia as part of a Southeast Asian tour which is seen as delivering a personal message that Beijing is a more reliable trading partner than the United States amid a bruising trade war with Washington.

Xi arrived in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, on Tuesday evening in what is his first visit to Malaysia since 2013. He flew in from Vietnam where he had signed dozens of trade cooperation agreements in Hanoi on everything from artificial intelligence to rail development.

The head of the British armed forces has visited China for the first time in a decade.

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin discussed "issues of common concern" with China's military leaders in Beijing, its defence ministry said in a short statement.

"We agreed that in an unstable world we must play our part as responsible nations with global interests," Sir Tony wrote on X, "and we reflected on the importance of military-to-military communications".

The last time a Chief of the Defence Staff visited China was in 2015. Since becoming prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer has sought to strengthen ties with the country.

Muslim Transnationalism in Modern China provides a portrait of underrecognized reformists who aimed to turn Muslim subjects into active Chinese citizens and revive “true” Islam in order to aid China‘s development and promote peace. Eroğlu examines reformists‘ engagement with local and transnational Muslim currents, spanning “orthodox,” “heterodox,” reformist, secular, and socialist movements from Egypt, Britain, India, Turkey, and the Soviet Union. She reveals their varied strategies and highlights how they adapted global ideas to address local challenges such as the policies of the Nationalist and Communist parties, the antireligion discourse of the New Culture Movement, and the anti-Islam rhetoric of Christian missionaries. Drawing from Republican and early Communist-era journals, Chinese translations of Islamic sources, and memoirs and travelogues, this book offers a nuanced understanding of Chinese-speaking Muslim intellectuals‘ efforts to balance local and global influences in shaping their community‘s future.

Published: April 16, 2025

Chinese manufacturers are creating connections directly with Western consumers amid Trump‘s trade war, showing the faces behind their products and offering deals shoppers won‘t find elsewhere.

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