I'm John Batson with my colleague Joseph Sternberg. He's a member of the editorial board of

Wall Street Journal. He's in London. He's based in London. He writes political economics. And we come to

China's response to the reciprocal tariff announced by Mr. Trump some six days ago, and the response is unhappy.

China talks about fighting to the end. At the same time, the Secretary of the Treasury of Mr.

Besant has responded to China's response by saying, they are holding a pair of twos. This is a metaphor based on poker. A pair of twos

would not be a winning hand and you wouldn't want to bet on it in a poker game. Joe, right now,

it looks like there's another world to explore, which is the hostile response from Beijing.

What is your measure about this pair of twos? What do they hold in

their hand, Joe? Well, I think that one of the things that we're discovering about China's

response to this over the past couple days is that they sort of have the luxury of ignoring the

tariffs, at least for a little bit. I mean, certainly China is squarely in the crosshairs of the Trump administration's trade

policies.

And the tariffs are going to hurt China over the longer term because Beijing's economic

model is so heavily dependent on exports to

the U.S. in particular.

So from that perspective, I think the Treasury Secretary Besson is right.

But what we've seen in the short term, over the past day or so, Beijing has been able to

step in and really act very aggressively to stabilize its stock markets because the Chinese

economy still is a closed system.

So that gives Beijing a lot of scope to manipulate the stock market to control some of the

worst effects of these moves.

Beijing has shown that it is going to be able to, you know, depreciate its currency,

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