Consider This from NPR - The whiplash of covering the trade war from inside China

Episode Date: May 17, 2025

Earlier this week, the White House announced that the U.S. and China had agreed to lower the reciprocal tariffs they had put in place in April – but only for ninety days. As the trade war enters a new and uncertain phase, host Scott Detrow speaks with veteran NPR China correspondent John Ruwitch about this unprecedented moment. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Imagine a cluster of buildings the size of a hundred football fields. Now imagine more than 20,000 businesses inside hawking their wares to another 200,000 potential customers. This is the Canton Fair in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, the biggest trade show in the world. If it's made in China, you can get it there. Hair dryers, headphones, hard hats, tools, tractors, yarn, electric wires, everything. And this is John Ruich, correspondent to Coverage China for NPR. One booth we went to had this sound.

And we went and checked it out, and it's these electric, like, they look like tennis rackets, they're electric bug zappers. John has been to the Canton Fair numerous times over the decades he has covered China, but this year it was different. I've sometimes had difficulty getting people to open up and this time everybody was willing to talk pretty much. It was mid-April, about a week after President Trump's so-called Liberation Day, when he

put tariffs on just about every country on earth, with China receiving the highest tariffs by far. It was a seismic shock to many people at the Canton Fair, including Stephen Zhang, sales manager for a mini oven manufacturer. Then he told me at the time that 90 percent of his business comes from the U.S. And so after the tariffs were jacked up to 145%, they shut down. They had an executive meeting and then basically told all the workers, I think he said they have 100 workers or something like that, to go home. Their pay would be cut. And they moved into a wait-and-see mode.

That uncertainty would continue for about a month until earlier this week when the U.S. and China reached a new agreement to lower tariffs. So a couple of days ago, John and his producer checked back in with Stephen Jong. They got the factory back up to about 70 or 80% of capacity, put 90% of the workers back on the factory line. That quickly? That quickly, they just turned around,

called these people up apparently and said, come back in to work. But he says they lost about half of their US clients in this. Smaller companies went out of business. People haven't been placing orders. Interestingly, for the products that he makes, they still face a 50% tariff, which is quite high. He says the future, you know, they're up and running again,

but the future is uncertain. Consider this. The two largest economies in the world are locked in a trade war. A whiplash of tariffs and trade deals and pauses and political rhetoric is creating deep uncertainty for businesses and consumers on both sides. So today, for our Weekly Reporter's Notebook series, John Ruich takes us behind the scenes as he tries to make sense of this unprecedented moment.

From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Consider This from NPR. Earlier this week, the White House announced what it called the first joint statement on trade in many years with China, end quote. The two countries had agreed to lower the reciprocal tariffs they had put in place in April, but only for 90 days. And even those tariffs are higher than they were before the Trump administration came into office.

The trade war is far from over. So we thought this would be a good moment to dig in on the process of covering China right now with NPR's John Rewich. I'm glad we're talking to you right now because the US-China trade relationship is one of the biggest stories in the world right now because the US-China trade relationship is one of the biggest stories in the world right now. And I will say, like, this is not an area I have extensively covered and I often find it hard to comprehend, but you have been covering this for a really long time.

You've been covering it up close. You understand these scenes. I want you to take us to a different scene that you've reported on, another side of the Chinese economy, an auto show in Shanghai. Tell us what you saw there. Yes. A few weeks ago, we went to the Shanghai auto show, which happens once every two years. This is another one of those things where it's an event in China that's laced with superlatives, right? This is one of the biggest car shows in the world. The place where it's

being held might even be bigger than where the Canton fair is held. It's just this vast location. But what we saw there is the biggest car market in the world sort of revving on all cylinders, right? It's ironic because there's no cylinders, right? It's the biggest EV market in the world. Any of these now make up more than 50% of new cars sold in China and the US by comparison, it's under 20%. And this technology in Shanghai at this car show was on full display.

There were drones for cars, there were cars that look like drones, there were flat screens everywhere. You know where the side mirror is in a car? Like apparently the thing that's coming, and I don't know if US regulations allow this yet, but in China, it's a camera now that aims back down the side of the car and there's a little screen on the side that you look at. So it's not a mirror, it's just digital? It's digital.

Wow, that would be disorienting. I don't know. I don't know if I need that technology. You'll need it. You don't know it now. In 10 years, I'll be like, I couldn't live without this. I can't believe I didn't have this. But there were American brands there.

Chrysler, Ford, Cadillac was there, but they were vastly outnumbered by Chinese brands. And I guess ultimately what that says about China, the economy's complex, it faces hurdles, but you really get the sense, there is real strong entrepreneurial spirit, hustle that you see at these trade shows, which again, are just a slice of life in a country like this,

but you can feel it there. Let's back up a bit. How long have you been reporting in China at this point? Oh yeah, my first reporting assignment to China was in 2001. Wow, so you've been there a while and there has been drastic, drastic, drastic change in this country over the time that you've been reporting on it.

Yes, that's safe to say. I think like as a foreign correspondent, you're trying to do two things that are really tricky, and I want to talk about them one at a time. The first is trying to report as an American journalist for an American news outlet. You're trying to report in a country where NPR is not necessarily top of mind, the American news ecosystem is not necessarily top of mind. And there's, you know, there's at times an adversarial tense relationship between the

US and China. Can you tell us how you go about your reporting? How you frame things? How you're typically received by people when you introduce yourself? Yeah, I have to say that people in China are generally quite warm when they when I introduce myself when they learn that I'm American. The ease of reporting there varies. Sometimes it can be quite difficult and hostile. It can be a challenging environment. It depends on the story. It depends on the political sensitivities at the moment.

It depends on the timing. In 2023, they launched the government launched an anti-espionage campaign. And I remember, you know, a couple of people that we reached out to or attempted to talk to one or two people were unwilling. They just couldn't trust us Late in the kovat period when China was still locked down. The rest of the world was open There was great frustration in the country People seemed very open to venting their frustration to us Alright, so that is one of the big challenges

of being a foreign correspondent. And the other, I think, is in a way is harder, actually, and that is taking this really complicated story that you live in and experience every single day and telling it in a way that brings our audience along if they haven't been closely following it, also trying to make it compelling and interesting and tell an engaging story.

And that can be tricky, especially when you're so in deep on a complicated story. How do you think about your pieces when you're sitting down to write them? Yeah, there's two sides of this. One is that there's news that needs to be covered. There's geopolitics, there's macroeconomics, there's political change, wherever, right?

In parts of China, there's events that happen which we need to cover. Beyond that, I think at NPR, we have kind of a special position, right? Within Western media, within the US media and that we can put voices of people from afar into the ears of American listeners. So to the greatest extent possible,

I'm searching for and in China, I looked for personal stories. And sort of one of the things that I've tried to do is pretty simple, but it's to tell stories featuring interesting people, maybe ordinary people, and getting their voices on the air so that American audiences hear them and recognize humans on the other side of the globe.

I had a fascinating conversation with a disabled poet a few months ago who was branching out into dance actually. So we saw her dance show. ["The Stage Is A Very Long Way From You's Roots"] The stage is a very long way from you's roots in a farming village in central China. But you has been catapulted to unlikely national fame by poems like...

We traveled to this far-flung sort of part of the center, sort of west, sort of central part of the country to the Yangtze River where we interviewed a guy who was playing piano to sort of process his grief from the pandemic. grief from the pandemic. In the summer of 2022, I dreamed of my father. I really missed him. He'd been gone over two years. And I wanted to do something for him because nobody talked about him anymore. He decided to perform the song in public on the street. So you said you filed your first story around 2001 or so, but that wasn't the first time you were in China.

You'd been there, what, a decade before for the first time? My first trip to China was in 92. And yeah, I went to the city of Kunming in southern China, in Yunnan province. And it was a different place back then, I tell you. I mean, what is the best way to think about, to envision just how much this country has changed since you first experienced it,

since you first started reporting on it to today? I mean, China's economy back then was two, 3% the size of what it is today, something like that. The reform and opening and the Chinese economic miracle, quote unquote, as we know it today, hadn't even really started then. I know that reform and opening started at the end of the 70s, but it hit a big speed bump in 1989 after the crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square. There were bikes. There was bikes everywhere.

Everybody talks about, oh, it used to be bikes everywhere. There were bikes everywhere. Nobody had a personal car. People dreamed of having a personal car back then. And now, Shanghai Auto Show. So that's looking backward. So much is changing. You have these big long-term technological trends.

You have these big long-term economic trends. You have this trade war that we truly don't know how it's going to turn out. Given all that, what do you think is next? What do you think is the next big story, the story you have the biggest questions about when it comes to China and its economy? Scott, are you asking for investment advice? If I am, then we have to do one of those fun disclaimers at the end like I Mean this place and the economy, you know the parable of the blind men touching the elephant Right each touch is a different part. It's a different it's different where you look. So I don't know what's next, you know going back to

1992 my first trip there or 2001 when I moved there as a journalist with Reuters In 1992, my first trip there, or 2001, when I moved there as a journalist with Reuters, there was always this sense of confidence in the future, confidence that China was getting better, confidence that my life today is 10 times better than my parents' life, my parents' life was 10 times better than their parents' life,

and my kids' life is gonna be 10 times better than mine. I think that has been challenged in people's minds, and if and when that can get turned around, unlocked, if they can reinvigorate that confidence in the future of the Chinese economy, great for the economy. If not, it's a more complex place to cover, to think about, to make predictions about. That was John Rewich, NPR's correspondent covering China. This episode was produced by Noah Caldwell. It was edited by Adam Rainey and Vincent Ney. Our executive producer, Sammy Ennegan.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detro. Look, we get it. When it comes to new music, there is a lot of it and it all comes really fast. But on All Songs Considered, NPR's music recommendation podcast, we'll handpick what we think's the greatest music happening right now and give you your next great listen. So kick back, settle in, get those eardrums wide open, and get your dose of new music from All Songs Considered, only from NPR.

Hey, we here, that's no faster! You've probably seen clips from the Jennifer Hudson show Spirit Tunnel on TikTok or Instagram, the ones where celebrities dance down the hallway to a clever song. These videos can reveal a lot. Do they have rhythm? And how famous are they, really? We're breaking down the inescapable internet trend. Listen to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR.