ReflectionsAs Xi calls Trump his ‘friend’, can poetry top politics in the US-China trade war?
The Chinese president recently referenced an ancient love poem when discussing the relationship between his country and the United States. Are the two heads of state preparing to kiss and make up?
Even as the world grow anxious about, and some of us confused by, the increasing hostilities between China and the United States, Chinese President Xi Jinping referred to his US counterpart Donald Trump as a “friend” in a speech delivered this month in Russia. He even described the relationship between China and the US in what could be construed as romantic language, where “I am in you, and you are in me”.
Xi was, of course, referring to things economic. Raw materials and goods move between the two giant nations in ways so complex that a tweak to one of these threads would set off a chain reaction that affects not only both countries but the rest of the world.
The Chinese president’s anthropomorphism of trade relations between both countries as two individuals being inextricably bound together through that deeply intimate phrase “I am in you, and you are in me”, is a throwback to a famous verse composed during a crucial moment of a marital crisis some 700 hundred years ago.
It isn’t too much that I marry wenches of Wu and Yue. / You, who are past your fortieth year, / Shall be ensconced as mistress of the house.
