Are President Trump and President Xi on the Brink of Turning Tariffs into a Trade War?

hello here is the latest on Donald Trump’s trade tariffs Mexico has had theirs paused Canada has escaped them too temporarily but they are now in place on all Chinese Imports into the United States China has retaliated but not in a massive way leading some people to think they’ve got a real strategy here but what could it be we will untangle that and investigate it further on this episode of the BBC’s Daily News podcast newscast hello it’s Adam in the fake newscast Studio but doing a real episode and the second half of this
episode we’re going to focus on the issue of fentanyl which is the synthetic opioid that’s responsible for lots of deaths from overdoses in the US and is the reason Donald Trump has given for applying lots of these tariffs to various countries Imports into the us because he sees it as a way of getting them to clamp down on the supply of fenel because they are important staging points in the global supply chain which ends up in America but first we’re going to get the latest on the Tariff situation Canada and Mexico have had
their Trump tariffs postponed or paused after Trump had calls with their leaders and managed to extract things he wanted from them but the 10% tariffs on All Imports into the US from China are going ahead and on Tuesday China retaliated but in quite a targeted way so not whacking massive tariffs on everything from America whacking not massive tariffs on some things coming from America which has got some people thinking they’ve got a real strategy here but what could it be let’s dive into it and find out because I’m joined
now from Beijing by the BBC’s China correspondent Laura bicker hi Laura hello Adam how are you so Laura just want to give us the basics of this story then what what American Imports into China will get more expensive as a result of these new tariffs so yes Beijing has decided to retaliate so it’s decided to implement 15% tariffs on liquefied national natural gas on H coal and a 10% levy on the likes of crude oil and large imported Us cars that will all take place on Monday February the 10th now that gives a little bit of time for
these two leading economies to step back from the brink of this trade War this is crucial because the measures that Beijing has implemented today are targeted and they don’t have the same impact as CH the the tariffs that the US has put on to Chinese Goods so Donald Trump has put a 10% levy on all Chinese goods and yet China today has done a bit of a measured approach so it’s just very very targeted and when you speak to analysts they’ll say that it’ll be about 30% of H us Imports into China so it doesn’t
have any kind of equili equilibrium so it may well be that Beijing is keeping that door open for some negotiations and we know from the White House that there is a call scheduled between Donald Trump and president shei and Cindy do you buy into that theory that actually this is a bit of a symbolic action to prepare the ground for some negotiations and the real action will come as a result of that yeah I very much agree with that um one thing is that how quickly this package has come into play basically tells me that Beijing had something
planned uh because they’ve been listening to Donald Trump throughout the campaign Trail they remember what happened in the last trade war and so they’ve been thinking you know okay Trump’s going to come in do these tariffs what are we going to do in return and so we’ve had this package of measures that have come in pretty quickly which tells me that Beijing has more up its sleeve because it’ll be anticipating that Trump will probably um up the anti in the in the coming months there are other parts of the package
that are quite more symbolic as well um for example this antitrust probe into Google which the search engine is not accessible within China but it provides Android software for Chinese phones um but it’s also just you know stereotypical American company that China can then say look we’re hitting the Americans as well as well as um the owner of Tommy hiler and Calvin Klein you know so there are certain things in the package that says to me this is a symbolic move so that Beijing can say we’re not backing down yet but we’re
also not going you’re going to go completely nuclear let’s talk and Laura what more do we know about this investigation into Google like what will they be looking at and what what could they what could they eventually do to Google well I think that is the real mystery because we I mean here in China we’re behind a great firewall it’s not like anybody on the street can then open their phone and use Google um it’s just not something that many people here use unless you have a VPN which helps you
jump that firewall so we’re kind of um in the bit bit in the dark about what this um probe will be about and I think that will be key as we look at in terms of the kind of thinking that Beijing has but when it comes to these measures targeting businesses such as Google I think what I’ve been hearing over the last few months is that Beijing was not going to go for a simple tip for T response as it did during the last trade War this time it wanted to kind of look at where was going to Target and one of
the reasons for this is because China sells far more to the US than it buys so last time during the trade War they actually ran out of things to impose tariffs on so this time they might be more strategic and that includes launching investigations into American Giants such as Google and also Cindy I mean this is a different Chinese economy that Donald Trump is having a go at now isn’t it compared to to four years ago compared to 10 years ago compared to 20 years ago absolutely in some ways the situation is better for China because
after the first trade War China began what’s called a dual circulation strategy which basically meant it was trying to be more self-reliant on its own Supply chains particularly in tech for example like companies like Huawei which now primarily Source from Chinese suppliers not least because American Act of American action so in some ways the Chinese economy is a bit more impervious to these measures at the same time the Chinese economy has also slowed in its growth um so the situation post pandemic for China has not basically recovered
compared to the first trade war and so you know to to Laura’s point there were fewer things that China could retaliate with and China’s economic strength is also less than what it was before and Laura we’ve been talking a lot over the last few days and the last few weeks that Donald Trump is using tariffs in a non-traditional way normally you use them to change the flow of trade between two countries normally to protect your homegrown industry from from competition from abroad but actually Trump is now
using tariffs as a as a tool to get something from his trading partners um what what is he trying to get from from China this time around and is that actually what we think he’s trying to get or is he just using that as a as a pretext well China has had this before they’ve learned from the Trump administration of 2017 and when you say that he’s using this as a diplomatic tool well that’s how how be Jing felt last time around this time around what does he want look we’ve had so many things banded around
from very many analysts I think one key thing that I have noticed over the last few weeks is this theory that Donald Trump wants president’s help to end the war in Ukraine and that is because during a couple of interviews and during a speech that he made to Davos he’s mentioned that China could help with that and China has significant sway when it comes to Russ is Vladimir Putin so that’s one Theory there are other things that Donald Trump may want from China and that includes maybe perhaps more
access more us businesses getting access to Chinese markets it may also be uh looking at whether or not there’s a deal to be done on H various access to for instance when it comes to the South China Sea H certainly that’s from China’s point of view they may want H us posturing to stop near Chinese Waters these the kind of things that could be to and fr and on the negotiating table make no mistake this any kind of deal negotiation or whatever our talks between Washington and Beijing it will not be the same as with Canada and
Mexico this will be a very very difficult negotiation what we don’t know and this is one thing that an analyst brought up with me today is has there been negotiations before this point because beijing’s response was incredibly muted yes it’s been Chinese New Year it is still Chinese New Year but beijing’s response right up until today has been incredibly muted so do they know that there could be negotiations in the offing and are they certainly have have there been negotiations going on so that’s
something that we don’t know H we know that there is a call later this week so there may be a deal to be done but what will Donald Trump want and Will President she give it to him and that could be long and it could be protracted and I think that’s what many businesses and certainly the markets might be worried about and Cindy we’ve sort of been talking as if Donald Trump is picking up from where he left off last time he was president but actually he’s kind of picking up where Joe Biden left
off because Joe Biden picked up from where Donald Trump left him the first time around this is a very unpopular point to be making in some quarters of American discourse Adam because you know the Democrats want to say that they’re very different than than the Republicans but yes you’re absolutely right you know Biden continued a lot of Trump’s approach on China with the chips for example the export controls on the most advanced chips into China you know the news from Deep seek last week shows that
that might not have worked as well as they hoped it would um also on the inflation reduction act which basically tries to cut out Chinese renewable suppliers in from the um green Supply chains of basically the world um what differentiates Trump’s approach though is that he is just so blanket about everything you know Biden was always trying to be very targeted justifying things in strategic Industries Trump is just putting 10 % on everything and what he wants to get out of it is not necessarily clear hard power either you
know you know to to Laura’s point about you know what are the political goals that he’s trying to achieve here Biden I think you can see him as trying to contain China as a threat as a challenge to the American superpowered him but with trump it might be a bit more pragmatic than that you know he doesn’t really care about for example Democrats in Taiwan he doesn’t really care necessarily about Taiwanese Independence he wants to know is American troop of American troops going to be deployed in
Taiwan do we well we need to get to that stage so it might be that some parts of this deal is not actually what we traditionally in the west think of when we think of protecting the west from China in the sense of what Trump’s priorities are as we have seen with his dealings throughout with these other allies as well is very very much America First and Laura you mentioned that it’s Chinese New Year which people are celebrating on a massive scale do you get the sense that that Chinese families are moving away from their Chinese New
Year celebrations to go and watch TV listen to the radio and click on whatever websites they can get to read about what Donald Trump is doing to China absolutely not it’s not even been headline news here in China um actually they’ve been uh looking and certainly the headline on much of Chinese social media has been about a Taiwanese actress who has sadly died from the flu so I think when you kind of look at what is a priority to Chinese State media they’ve not made this uh one of their key kind of news headlines now that may be
because uh certainly the Chinese State media don’t want to worry a population that is already slightly concerned about its own economy what they’re trying to do here in China is get people to spend money fears of trade War would make people save it so I think uh when it comes to trying to H seow the seeds of fear into the population that’s maybe why those headlines are not quite there from the average Chinese perspective they look with curiosity over at Donald Trump they see this political pendulum
swinging in America every four years and they look at it with both a little bit of intrepidation but really just with curiosity remember here they see and feel that this is a stable government and many people will look at America and wondering what’s going on but from Beijing leaders perspective what Donald Trump is doing when he is threatening tariffs to Canada Mexico and now the EU he will be basically alienating traditional us allies now if you’re the leader in Beijing if you’re president G and you’re watching this especially as
he’s made no secret of his Ambitions to be the leader of a new world order you’re looking at this and wondering is this an opportunity for China to step in you’re walking watching America withdraw from parts of the world in terms of you know us Aid China may decide it wants to you know develop H its aid program especially uh perhaps its Loan program through belt and Road initiative so from president J’s perspective From beijing’s perspective what is happening in America is one a curiosity and perhaps for its
president an opportunity well yeah and I remember towards the tail end of my time in Brussels which I seem to be talking about a lot this week it’s almost like we’ve got a big anniversary coming up and one of the big things that they’ve been working on in Brussels was a was a trade and investment deal with China which Cindy Biden came in and told the EU to to pull so that’s an example of how actually even fairly recently people were like deepening their ties with China it’s not just all been like
pulling apart y that’s true although the European Parliament even at the time as you know Adam was very anti that deal um but I think I think what this raises is a question of how do the countries in the middle calibrate between these two giant States having this big argument you know if you are Canada or the EU or the UK you know what is it that you’re meant to do to a survive B to maximize your National interest it is really really tricky um and I think there’s a bit of Shard and Freud in the UK this week because of
that long phone call that Kama had with Trump because of the fact that Trump earlier in the week said that UK was out of line but at least you know I think something can be done there you know everyone’s looking around at each other and thinking God are we next what can we do about it in the in the meantime and you know part of the unpredictability of Trump’s approach is that he risks driving a lot of these powers in the middle towards China in a way that the trend was definitely getting away from China under Joe Biden now is that a good
you know brinksmanship strategy to make the EU for example pay more into NATO or will that actually just you know drive a wedge between the US and its Western allies we simply don’t know at the moment but it certainly is brinksmanship he’s he’s pushing his allies to the maximum to say you know you got to pick a side and he’s betting that they will pick the Americans so we didn’t talk about it there with Cindy and Laura but one of the big stated reasons in fact the main stated reason Donald Trump has
given for applying tariffs to China and trying to apply tariffs to Mexico and Canada is because those three countries are involved in various stages of the production and transport of this synthetic opioid of the synthetic opioid called fenel which is a huge topic of conversation in the US much less of a conversation Topic in the UK because the drug is not consumed in nearly the same quantities here so I wanted to find out a bit more just about why fent nil is such a big deal and also to just kind of get a mental map of how Canada Mexico
and China fit into it so somebody who knows that really well because he spent years going undercover investigating and then writing about it for his book fenil Inc is the investigative journalist Ben westoff who’s here on newscast hello Ben hello nice nice to meet you yeah thanks for joining us on newscast so before we we dive into kind of like the global web around this substance what actually is fenel and where did it originate who who invented it in the first place fenil was invented as a hospital painkiller and has been used for decades
in procedures like open heart surgery it’s very important medical drug but it’s only in the last 10 years or so that it’s jumped into the illicit realm and is used uh as a drug of abuse and what is it about um American Drug taking habits or trends that means its use is just skyrocketed fenil is piggybacked on the opioid epidemic which started with the overprescription of pills like Oxycontin and um which were mismarked as non addictive basically and so when people had an injury they were prescribed these pills their pills ran
out most of them um many of them turned to the black market and they started using fenil from the streets eventually the market sort of overtook the the heroin that was available and fenil rushed in to fill the void and and people take it as pills well Fen nail can be as a a fake prescription pill that looks exactly like an oxyc conton or a Xanax or a Percocet can also be a powder um there’s there’s lots of different ways to take it but it’s the the bottom line is that only the tiniest little dose is enough
to um have someone overdose and die and just give us a a sense of the size of the problem in the states it’s the worst drug epidemic in US history in fact some people are saying it’s the worst drug epidemic in world history um you know it wasn’t that long ago that there were maybe 2,000 Americans a year dying from drug overdoses and then it’s it’s recently got up over a 100,000 so and have there been particular moments that have kind of seized the nation’s attention and made people realize what
what a problem this is there’s so many celebrities who have died of of fenel I mean you had uh the the rock stars Prince Tom Petty a lot of famous Rapp ERS actors Michael K Williams from The Wire uh Coolio I mean you almost seems like every week you hear about another famous celebrity who died from fenil and is it so widespread amongst kind of everyone else that that most people will know somebody or know somebody who knows somebody who’s who’s either taking fenil or has has died from an overdose is it kind of that
prevalent yeah I mean you talk to to anyone really and they’re they’re likely to know someone whose family family has been affected by fenil I had a very close friend die um back in 2010 and that sort of is what started me on my quest to learn about the drug and write my book fentel Inc and talking about your quest I mean that took you to lots of different places around the world because as I was saying a minute ago there there is a global web that of this drug that ends up in the United States yeah all of the raw ingredients
for fenil are made in China and so I went undercover pretending to be a drug buyer into some labs in China that were making fentel and fenil precursors and I really got to understand um you know the drug traffickers there are not like Mexican or or other drug traffickers with AK-47s these are scientists and you know businessmen who are often times operating legally under Chinese law and yet they’re the ones kind of fueling the epidemic and how is it that they’re operating legally If the product they’re
producing is so dangerous well China has kind of slowly cracked down uh Banning fenil and these different types of fenil called fenil analoges but still legal are a lot of the fenel precursors which are basically the most important ingredients needed to make fenil and so these companies sell these precursors to the Mexican cartels who make fenel the rest of the way and then they send it North across the border into the United States and and and it’s interesting reading about these factories in China because either they can make the case
that they’re making you products that become ingredients for something else that’s completely legitimate and also you hear about that they can actually sort of change their production lines really quickly so if someone comes looking it can the factory can just look much much less suspicious really quickly yeah sometimes these factories will be making something totally legal and benign in the daylight hours and switch in the nighttime hours um the biggest problem is that they just don’t have the enforcement in China you know
even the laws they have on the books they don’t have the boots on the ground to stop it um also a lot of this stuff is being sent directly through the mail and so you know it’s very easy to mislabel something as a different chemical illegal chemical a safe chemical um and trying to stop it from getting into the US is kind of a needle and a Hy stack approach CU there’s such a high volume of maale coming from China already tell me what it was like when you went undercover in the in the factories posing as a buyer just what
was that like I um had to tell a whole story I had to pretend basically I actually said that my friend was the drug trafficker and I just happened to be in China scoping out the place and I said if you let me see your your lab and it passes our quality um expectations then he’ll make a big order and so uh this guy kind of vetted me for the whole morning and he asked me directly if I was a journalist I had to you know make up this whole whole story put on my acting skills but eventually he allowed me to come and it looked kind
of like a high school chemistry lab really I mean if you’ve seen the show Breaking Bad it was a fairly you know high quality sort of well m maintain lab this the smell was was very powerful and um I I you know he showed me where they were making all these fenil products also something called synthetic cannaboids sometimes called K2 and spice which are another big problem and eventually um he asked me if I was going to if we were going to make a buy and I said I would get back to him so I I got out of there by the skin of my teeth I
know that President Biden talked a lot about this and took a lot of action and president Trump in his first term took a lot of action is there anything that’s happened up till now that sort of worked that’s that’s helped to tackle the the trade well during Trump’s first term he had that was the first kind of trade War where he threatened to increase all these tariffs against China and and did and he demanded that China take action against fenel and they actually did they banned what are known as fenil analoges
these different types of fenil um that were technically still legal and so president she banned fenil analoges and so people thought that was great at the time unfortunately all these companies making them just shifted to the fenel precursors and so now what Trump is asking for is for China to really crack down in the companies making these feno precursors and he’s betting that because threatening tariffs worked last time that threatening tariffs will work again this time and is there something the Chinese authorities could convincingly
do or is it actually just a the reason they haven’t necessarily done it or succeeded is because it’s a bit of a it’s a bit of a whack-a-mole problem it’s a s it’s a unsolvable problem ultimately well I think as a totalitarian country there’s more China can do um they one thing that uh America would like China to do is these companies selling fenil precursors there are legitimate uses for these right like I said fentel is an important Hospital product but making sure that the buyers in Mexico are legitimate you know almost
all of the the cartels they have these front companies and so they buy these fenil precursors and really they’re just going to be made into drugs but America would like China to to make sure these companies are only selling to legitimate Hospital fenel providers and not just Drug Company fronts and that should be something that should be enforceable although to me that sounds like that’s not a problem that’s solved by putting 10,000 Mexican troops on the border which is what seems to have led Trump to
to pause his tariffs on Mexico it sounds like that’s a much more domestic law enforcement thing for the Mexican Government to do rather than the very visible um sending the troops to the Border I agree I don’t believe that beefing up security at the border is really going to do anything um fenil is so powerful and so small uh the way it works that a million doses can fit in a briefcase right and so what I would say is that we can’t stop drugs from getting into prisons you know you hear about prisoners overdosing and dying all the
time and that’s a maximum security environment so there’s no way to stop drugs from getting into this country it’s going to find a way and what we need to do instead is focus on addicted users and helping them beat their addictions and Canada how does Canada fit into this picture in terms of the supply a lot of fenil comes through Canada there’s a lot of uh drug laundering fenil trafficking um some of it comes through the the northern border with the United States and there’s um there’s a lot of Chinese gangs actually
that are clandestinely making fenil in Canada and then they’re laundering their money through real estate in places like Vancouver um so Canada Canada plays into the whole fentel epidemic as well and and Canada has its own problem too um with people overdosing and dying there’s Canada and the United States are the two countries that have this big problem so so Donald Trump does have a bit of a point when he says Canada’s involved in this too that’s not just Bluster or an excuse to have a go at
Canada I think the vast majority of fenel comes through the southern border with Mexico in the United States but a lot of fenel trafficking uh excuse me but a lot of fenel production does occur in Canada and I think that’s more likely to maybe come through the mail um you were giving evidence to a congressional committee last spring I just wondered what was it like being right in the kind of political Center of this of this crisis unfortunately politics you know screws up everything and um both the Democrats and the Republicans were
talking so much about more border security you know more troops more technology to stop getting to stop getting fenil across the border but really the the problem was that we need to focus on the addicted users um the people most likely to die from fentanyl are people who have been addicted did for for years if not decades and it’s not just heroin you know with fenil cut into it but fenil is often cut into cocaine meth prescription pills and so really you can’t get pure drugs in the United States at all anymore and someone
might have had a cocaine addiction for for years and years but now there’s fenil in it and they they overdose and die and so we need to educate these users and we need to provide them with treatment drugs there’s there’s very good treatment drugs out there that are FDA approved it’s just that the majority of addicted users don’t have access there’s one I’m doing a documentary about called nxone which is basically a vaccine for opioids it’s like a force field to protect you but uh almost
nobody is is receiving it and is that uh it cost too much issue or it’s a moral issue where people feel it’s it’s help helping somebody who potentially going to do a bad thing as as far as far as a certain chunk of society sees it yeah there is plenty of funding um for alrex Zone and these other treatment drugs it’s just the problem is that people don’t know they’re available and there is a moral component to it too people say well you know you got to use your your you know your strength your
courage it’s a it’s a moral failing you got to do this by yourself when really um medication is the key to beating opioid addictions and why is it that some countries like the UK for example just don’t have just don’t have this problem it’s just not here to the the same extent fortunately for the UK and and Europe uh you never had a bad opioid crisis based on these prescription pills in the first place and that’s what’s fueled the problem in the US and Canada and so you know we had had and still
have very LAX advertising laws so major Pharmaceuticals are always being advertised on TV and actually since Purdue Pharma who made oxycon and mism marketed it all the stuff they did is basically still legal in the United States which means we could see another problem like this oh actually just before you go um is it true that the fenol pills they’re actually really really cheap to buy yeah fenel is incredibly cheap on the streets you know places like San Francisco kind of the the center of the epid mic and it’s like
$5 a dose to to get fentin on the street so it’s really crazy yeah you can see see why it took off uh Ben thank you very much and thanks for all your your many years of going undercover and speaking to to scary people on our behalf so thank you