Xi Has Trump Right Where He Wants Him

Mr. Gewirtz, a China historian at Columbia University, served in senior China policy roles in the Biden administration’s National Security Council and State Department.

When President Trump imposed 145 percent tariffs on China a year ago, Chinese state media urged the public to revisit a nearly 90-year-old essay by Mao Zedong. The Beijing Daily declared that the text was essential to understanding China’s responses to the “chaotic” attacks of the United States and why China will ultimately achieve a “final victory” against its geopolitical rival.

This required reading was Mao’s “On Protracted War,” a 1938 tract laying out his strategy for defeating the Japanese forces that had........

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