Five cards China holds in a trade war with the US

The leadership may "very well be willing to endure the pain to avoid capitulating to what they believe is US aggression", Mary Lovely, a US-China trade expert at the Peterson Institute in Washington DC, told BBC Newshour earlier this month. Following reports that the White House will use bilateral trade negotiations to isolate China, Beijing has warned countries against "reaching a deal at the expense of China's interests". That would be an impossible choice for much of the world "We can't choose, and we will never choose [between China and the US]," Malaysia's trade minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz told the BBC last week.