Xi suggests China must rely on a prolonged struggle and the mobilization of the entire population.
As Washington and Beijing remain locked in a high-stakes tariff war, an insider said Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials are willing to engage in a long-term conflict with the United States.
According to the insider, Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s close ally, Cai Qi, said at a high-level CCP meeting to assess the U.S.–China tariff war that the Chinese populace must endure the resulting economic strain—even if it causes suffering for the Chinese people on par with the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961, which killed an estimated 40 million across rural China.
After Washington imposed tit-for-tat tariffs, both sides on May 12 agreed to reduce tariffs for 90 days to allow for negotiations. Meanwhile, CCP officials have pledged to “fight to the end” and have made references to wartime rhetoric about achieving “total victory.”
Australia-based Chinese dissident and former law professor at Peking University, Yuan Hongbing, told The Epoch Times that Xi has instructed CCP officials to re-study Mao Zedong’s 1938 lecture “On Protracted War” as a framework for responding to U.S. tariffs. Yuan cited his information from a well-placed source whose family belongs to the CCP’s so-called “princeling” class, the second generation of the founders of communist China.
Mao’s lecture at the time emphasized that there would be no quick victory against the Japanese invasion, and that China must rely on a prolonged struggle and the mobilization of the entire population.
Xi’s broader strategy for countering U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods includes selectively lowering tariffs on certain American goods to ease domestic economic pressure, while maintaining a confrontational stance and attempting to sow discord within U.S. society, Yuan said.
According to Yuan’s source, Cai Qi said the regime survived the “economic catastrophe” of the Great Famine and referred to its cause as “three years of natural disasters.”
The famine was a direct consequence of Mao’s Great Leap Forward—a radical and aggressive economic campaign carried out by the CCP’s new centrally-planned system.
During those three years, starving peasants resorted to eating leaves, tree bark, and grass to alleviate their hunger.
By Olivia Li
