China still refuses to blink in looming trade war with U.S.

President Trump has framed conflict as a necessary fight.

BEIJING — China’s second highest-ranking official delivered a confident message Wednesday amid the looming trade war with the United States: Beijing will survive.

The remarks from Premier Li Keqiang to a crowd in the port city of Tianjin seemed directed at President Donald Trump — with- out invoking his name — as fresh tariff announcements bring the United States and China closer to an all-out out trade war.

“China’s development over the past decades has always been achieved by overcoming all sorts of different obstacles and challenges,” he said, a day after Beijing pledged to immediately punch back at Trump’s next round of tariffs on $200 billion in Chi- nese imports with levies on an additional $60 billion in American goods.

“Each time, we managed to pull through,” Li added.

Trump has framed the conflict as a necessary fight, argu- ing China has been breaking the global trade rules for years at the expense of American workers. The battle is popular among some labor groups: Union leaders in the Midwest have long blasted China for luring away factories with cheaper labor, and the White House has accused Beijing of stealing intellectual property from U.S. companies that enter its market.

The looming onslaught of tariffs, Trump has said, should pressure Beijing to change its ways.

“China has been taking advantage of the United States on Trade for many years,” he tweeted Tuesday. “They also know that I am the one that knows how to stop it.”

If the Chinese government follows through with its threat to retaliate Monday, Trump has pledged to strike back with duties on $267 billion in Chinese products. At that point, bothsides will have nearly run out of imports to target.

Subject to tariffs of up to 10 percent are electronics, furniture, chemicals, handbags, spark plugs, human hair — items ordinary and niche that have become shipping container fixtures over the four-decade commercial relationship.

Neither country can avoid pain inthis trade war, economists warn. The cost of household goods is expected to rise, since global supply chains weave through the Asian nation. Chinese economists predict layoffs in the country’s manufacturing sector. American farmers and business owners, meanwhile, fear they’ll lose access to the lucrative Chinese market: a middle class of consumers larger than the entire U.S. population.