With or without tariffs, China’s global rise is under way
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Al Jazeera Podcasts. Today, is the door opening to a Chinese renaissance? The irony is that everything Trump is doing at the moment is great for China. With wearable robots, a boom in artificial intelligence, and a power vacuum on the global stage, is China ready to meet the moment? I'm Kevin Hurtin, and this is The Take.

In the last couple of weeks, since the Trump administration's really started kicking in, we see China sort of taking on a new role, almost as a sort of one of responsibility and stability. ♪

My name is Tony Cheng. I'm the Al Jazeera correspondent based in Bangkok, but I'm up in China at the moment where I've been for the last three weeks. We've been all over the country covering the National People's Congress. A meeting of the Chinese government that takes place every year, sometimes referred to as China's parliament. Most of it takes place behind closed doors, but it does give us a little insight into what the Chinese government is planning for the year ahead.

Well, Tony, it's always great to have you on, but you really have a good amount of perspective for this story because you were Al Jazeera's correspondent in Beijing 20 years ago. 20 years ago. So you've been back and forth here and there, but now you find yourself on this reporting project on the ground, first time in China since 2019. So just to start off, what's it like reacquainting yourself with this country that you knew so well? I mean, what's changed?

It's really fascinating, actually. I was here between 2005 and 2010. It was an amazing time to be in China because it was a time when China was opening up to the world. I think I traveled to almost every province in China in those five years.

We saw everything from this huge development to a lot of old China, from the extreme poverty out into the countryside to outrageous displays of wealth that were starting to flow into the country. It's been really interesting to kind of catch up with the country. I think it's a time when China is really sort of cementing itself

both as a permanent presence on the world stage, but also trying to make that step up from being, I think, a country which a lot of people consider outside China. They're a little bit concerned about it. And we see that certainly with the Trump administration coming into power. You know, they say that China is the global threat now. You know, we don't need to worry about Russia. We don't need to worry about Iran. The real concern is China.

Can you run through a couple of the most impactful moves by the U.S. in terms of how they affect China and how they're being received there? I mean, one of the things we've been reporting on in the last week is the tariffs that the Trump administration has imposed on China. Now, 20 percent of all goods exported into the United States are going to be hit by tariffs.

And that's a real issue here. I mean, China is the third largest exporter into the United States. It has most favored trade nation status with the United States. But I think there was an awareness when Trump won the election last year that sort of China was in the crosshairs. I think many people have been expecting this. They saw what happened last time.

But I think also there's a hope that, like last time, there might be a trade deal to be made. I mean, well, let's start at the beginning. In the last week, we've been traveling out to factories in Zhejiang. We've been speaking to businessmen in a city called Yiwu, which has the largest sort of small commodities market in the world. It's this amazing place.

like a sort of shopping mall on steroids, but it's where you go to find the suppliers for all those things from air fryers to umbrellas to Christmas trees, Christmas decorations. It's just 5.5 million square meters of floor space. And apparently they did $70 billion worth of business in that building alone last year.

The suppliers there were pretty nervous. I think these are the people who are going to feel the pinch. I'm concerned about the tariffs because America is still the largest consumer market for our party celebration products. The additional tariffs will increase the price of goods for customers, which will make it difficult for us to export more goods abroad.

But then we went out to the factories a little further inland. We spoke to a guy who was making exercise treadmills. A third of his production goes to the United States. He said he hasn't seen any drop in orders at all. And part of the reason for that is because you just can't get the products he's making in the United States. There are no other suppliers. And I think they're not that concerned about what has been imposed so far, but they think there's probably more to come.

There's also China's booming tech sector. You literally tried it on for size. You put on this wild six-armed robotic vest like Dr. Octopus kind of thing. It's this image. I can't get out of my mind, Tony. Talk about this emerging tech sector and what you saw there. I mean, it looked like you were in the future.

Well, that was a really interesting moment, actually, because we had gone to this factory, it's a workshop run by a company called EX Robotics, and they make humanoid robots. So there are lots of companies in China that are making manufacturing robots, and we saw a lot of them working in the factories we visited. But this place is specifically focusing on making robots like humans. And up to this point, they've been often for sort of museum displays, things like that.

But they have made very great leaps in the last couple of months, largely because of AI. The robotic arms you were talking about, it was really like something out of a Hollywood movie, but they put these things on me. And what I didn't realize was just how strong they were. And at one point, the guy controlling them kind of grabbed me in an embrace, which I really wasn't expecting. But, you know, just how advanced these things are

is really quite incredible. You know, they have very realistic facial expressions. There are little motors, you know, behind the sort of fake skin controlling facial expressions. And, you know, they said quite openly, you know, we're not as good as the United States yet. We don't have the fine motor controls that they do.

But we're getting there. And the point they made, and this is as true in robotics as I think it is in many other fields in China, is that the whole supply chain is in China. So, you know, everything from the tiny little screws to the silicon skin, and now, most importantly, the AI. And I think this is the other really big jump. Are humans going to be overtaken by robots?

Robots will not completely replace human jobs in the short term. Humans still have advantages in creative work, emotional relationships, and some complex decision-making. We've now in the last couple of months seen two independent AIs being launched out of China. They both appear to be working very well. They, you know, and that

Everywhere you go in China, you're seeing the letters AI. China is really preparing itself for the AI boom. The government's been talking about it at the MPC this week. And this, I think, is the way they see themselves getting out of economic troubles, whether those are domestic ones or ones on the international front from the United States.

Yeah. Deep Seek. And now this new one, Manos, bigger and better AI. I mean, even with Trump's tariff war, China set this pretty robust five percent growth in GDP target. Do you think that's realistic?

It's very ambitious, certainly. I think the projections from the World Bank were 4.5%. And when you're talking about half a percentage point with an economy the size of China's, that is an awful lot. It's an ambitious target, clearly, and it's going to be really hard to imagine it happens without a trade, with a trade war going on. I mean, you said the entire supply chain for all the stuff being made in the US is in China. One of the issues that you pointed out during your reporting is that

The Chinese don't know who to get on the phone in Washington to start negotiating. Yeah, I mean, again, this is, I think we're,

With a government like China, you don't get the kind of leaks and the access that you might do elsewhere. So there is a lot of speculation here. But we know that they have sent a former ambassador to Washington, D.C. a couple of weeks ago. We know that they are keen to do a trade deal with Washington, D.C. They know Donald Trump. When things started to get a little bit complicated during his first term,

term, Xi Jinping went, they went to Mar-a-Lago, they had sat down, they had chocolate cake. I think Trump referred to it as the most beautiful chocolate cake. And they did get a trade deal. It didn't work apparently as well as Trump wanted because he lost the election and he felt that the Biden administration didn't follow through properly.

But Donald Trump wants investment, and the Chinese are very happy to start investing in the United States. Previously, the pathway was Jared Kushner. I think at this stage, they don't really know who to approach, and they don't know which person in the administration they can speak to who's really going to have the ear of the president.

So, OK, so the U.S., the new U.S. administration, economically, you have these tariffs, you have this protectionism, but there's also this U.S. foreign policy retreat, right? This ostensible end of USAID halting foreign aid generally.

Here's what China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi said: "If every country emphasizes its own national priorities and believes only in strength and status, the world will regress to the law of the jungle. Small and weak countries will bear the brunt, and international rules and order will be severely impacted."

Yi has spoken out about the U.S. policy on Ukraine and on Gaza, taking this role as kind of like the adult in the room, Tony. Do you see China embracing this role? And what do you think that that augurs for the future?

You know, it's really interesting. We were reporting on Wang Yi's press conference that happened last Friday. And yeah, I think he came out very much with that intention. He made that statement right at the beginning. He didn't talk too explicitly about the United States, but it was very clear who he was talking about. I mean, you know,

As somebody who spent decades reporting on China, it's really quite an oppressive state that has meddled in the affairs of other nations and often in quite a detrimental way. That we are at this point looking at China as a stabilizing, as you said, adult in the room. I mean, it's really quite a surprise. That said, I mean, they really are at the moment.

On the Ukraine, he said that all parties needed to be involved in peace negotiations. On the Gaza Strip, he said China supports Egypt's solutions and the most important thing is reconstruction and just getting basic aid to the people who need it at the moment, particularly with Israel cutting off humanitarian aid.

At the same time, I don't think we're going to see China rushing into the spaces that USAID has left behind or the State Department. Where I was at the time in Bangkok, it was astonishing. There are State Department and USAID programs stretching off across all of Southeast Asia.

And they had a very immediate impact. For example, there are nine refugee camps on the Myanmar-Thai border, which are basically supported by the U.S. State Department. Their funding had been cut off so immediately that

The water had been shut off in one of these camps. You know, there were 15,000 people suddenly living without running water or medical care or in some cases even food. Now, China is not going to enter into that space. But the fact that the United States has retreated allows China to move in in different ways. And I think that's what we're going to see next.

That counterbalance is gone. You saw that with what happened with these Uyghur prisoners in Thailand. Yeah, and that was the other thing that happened. Thailand's prime minister was in Beijing on a state visit, and they laid out a red carpet. Thailand's prime minister is a relatively young woman in her early 30s with very little political experience.

Xi Jinping, the president of China, for the foreseeable future, a hugely powerful man, sat her down, spent time with her. There were photo ops. They gave her everything. And the reason is because Thailand is the United States ally. But what we then saw a couple of weeks later was that

was 40 Uyghurs who had been in detention in Thailand, sort of in limbo. They had escaped China and had been trying to get to a third country. They'd been intercepted in Thailand. The Thais didn't want to irritate the Chinese by sending them to a third party. They also didn't want to irritate the international community by sending them back to Thailand.

We know the Uyghurs, the ethnic Muslims who live in the west of China have been oppressed in a terrible way over the last seven or eight years. And then suddenly they were whisked off back to Kashgar City in the far west of China. And the reason for that is because I think all of those things where the United States has been the counterbalance, there's no counterbalance anymore.

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This week on Now You Know, we speak with Ibtihaj Muhammad, the first American Muslim Olympian to compete in a hijab. She shares her journey about navigating her identity and the importance of representation in sports. That's on Now You Know. Find us on Al Jazeera's YouTube channel or listen wherever you get your podcasts. So, Tony, we talked about the U.S. and China are these two great powers still.

What fascinates me is in so many ways, China is like the mirror image of the U.S. Right. Internationally, the U.S. is shrinking as China is expanding its influence. And then domestically, unlike the U.S., where so many people are drowning in debt, one of China's struggles is that its people save too much. Right. And also that there's too much housing stock as opposed to the housing shortages you see everywhere else in the world. In China, they built too much.

Now, those might seem like good problems to have, but they are pretty serious headwinds for this Chinese economy, aren't they? I think the Chinese, as a nation, they're a cautious people. They've seen huge change. When they make money, they want to make sure that, first of all, that they're secure. And one of the best ways that they can secure their money is by putting it in property.

Unfortunately, what's happened in China is that sort of guiding principle led to a property boom. You had this building boom, which was employing laborers. There was investment in real estate. It was really vital to the incredibly dynamic growth that went on in China.

Problem is, it just raced away, well out of control. 60 million empty, vacant homes in China. But that's enough to house almost every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom. It's amazing. Separately, which is astonishing. And they're sitting there to the point where they're now rotting.

Youth unemployment is also rising. You visited one town with plenty of housing, but not many people. And you talked to a woman who she started a pizza business there, which, you know, would appeal to young people, but it just didn't work. Can you tell me that story? It's a city called Yinkou. It's on the coast shoreline and sort of northeastern China.

It had been a fairly industrial port in the past. They'd built a massive convention center. There were plans to make it a free port. You know, it's relatively close to Japan and Korea. They built all these luxury apartments, built factories, exhibition centers, and nobody came. And it is, it's a ghost city. Paneling the woman we spoke to,

She'd moved there about four years ago. She'd opened up a pizza restaurant, you know, opening a pizza restaurant in northeastern China. It's quite a, it takes quite a leap of faith. It was ironically called the Happy Pizza Restaurant, but Pan Ling was not looking very happy. Young people are leaving the city to find jobs outside and more and more people are going to big cities. So fewer and fewer people are staying here to live and work.

She said she couldn't even afford to keep the pizza part of the business open anymore. She said the problem is there was no one really there anymore, particularly the young people. The young people that were there were leaving, going to Shanghai, going to Beijing, going to the places where they knew they could get jobs. And we were out filming one day. We drove down a street and saw a sort of impromptu marketplace where people were just

selling whatever they had and literally old coats, you know, secondhand. And it was funny because having been in this very technologically advanced China, this, you know, China of AI and robotics and the future, suddenly I was back 20 years in the China that was really struggling. And there are still many who haven't even made it that far.

That's exactly it. China is being pulled in opposite directions. On the one hand, it has this amazing opportunity with the U.S., what's going on in the U.S. to really take the lead. But then it has these challenges. And it sounds like there's a lot of kind of doubt amongst the Chinese people, optimism, but also doubt because they've seen China's global role diminish in the past.

those economic times that poverty is just a generation or two away. What are your final thoughts just having toured the country again after 20 years? Which side wins out? I mean, I think what's interesting, we are looking at this very much with the US perspective. What is interesting actually, when you go around China, is the US is not really part of the equation anymore. It used to be.

but less and less so. The manufacturers are trying to diversify away. They're looking at markets in Southeast Asia and Europe and Africa. Politically, sure, they are acutely aware that the Trump administration is something that they're going to have to handle. But I think it's really domestically that people are really concerned. And, you know, I've been very aware over the years of a certain...

insecurity in a lot of Chinese people that, yeah, they come from a great nation, but it's taken a few knocks. And I don't see that anymore. And it's not an arrogance. It's just an understanding of the fact that they are. They're right there at the top now. I think a lot of people have reached a level of affluence and stability that gives them a certain confidence. And that's the kind of thing that I haven't seen.

I think it's also important to remember that personal liberties have not changed at all in all of these things that we're talking about. Personal liberties remain very limited in China, but it's also part of that social deal, an unspoken deal they've done with the government. Give us the security, give us the growth, give us the economic stability, and we'll sacrifice some of those personal liberties.

I think as they find themselves more secure, they might want more space to express a more diverse range of ideas. But yeah, that's something that's going to happen very slowly in Chang. I think that's a good place to end it. Tony Chang, thank you for coming on The Take. Thanks very much, Kevin. Great to speak to you.

And that's The Take. This episode was produced by Amy Walters and Sari Al-Khalili with Khaled Sultan, Hannah Shokir, Melanie Marich, Philip Llanos, Spencer Klein, and me, Kevin Hurtin. It was edited by Alexander Locke. Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editors are Hisham Abusalah and Mohanad Almelham. Alexander Locke is The Take's executive producer and Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera's head of audio.

We'll be back tomorrow.