The anointed one complains that the Chinese keep taking his crayons, dropping worms down his collar and stealing his dinner money. When you don’t know how to negotiate just whine loudly.
In a masterful stroke of negotiation from the Tantrum School of international trade and commerce, Trump threw a soiled diaper at the wall and threatened to punish the USA with price hikes and shortages.
One of the difficulties for the Chinese, as with the Mexicans and Canadians, is they were all unaware that any negotiations were taking place. The issues with the Canadians and Mexicans could have easily been resolved with actual negotiations. The use of grown up diplomatic processes would have caused a lot less upheaval in the money markets. Unless senility has taken hold, he should know about this as he negotiated the last agreement with Mexico regarding troop deployment to the border.
In a skilled manoeuvre he ensured that the Chinese were threatened with tariffs on oil and gas exports; products that they can easily get from Russia. Presumably the plan is to strengthen the Russian economy by increasing their trade with China.
Another genius move was in annoying the major supplier of the rare earth metals essential for the manufacture of most modern electrical devices. China has added severe restrictions on the export of five of these critical metals; tungsten, molybdenum, indium, bismuth and tellurium. China can gas and oil from other places, but the options for the USA to get these metals from other places is very limited. China produces the bulk of the world’s tungsten with Russia, Vietnam and North Korea producing 10% of what China does. The situation is similar for indium, bismuth and tellurium. The USA does have some molybdenum.
The ultimate masterstroke was not to introduce the threat of tariffs as part of any trade negotiations. How seriously are countries going to be in negotiating with the tantrum-meister? Erratic and unpredictable are his super powers. Not sure how many countries are fans of those properties.