When U.S. President Donald Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping last October, he rated the summit a "12 out of 10," and the White House said China would "effectively eliminate" rare earth export controls and cease retaliation against U.S. firms.

Instead, even as it has ‌refrained from overt criticism of Trump over the Iran war and signaled it wants a positive meeting between the two leaders, Beijing has quickly moved to expand its toolkit of economic pressure mechanisms aimed at Washington.

Since last October, China has enacted laws to punish foreign entities that shift supply chains away from China, tightened the rare earth licensing regime, banned foreign AI ‌chips from state-funded data centres, barred U.S. and Israeli cybersecurity software from Chinese companies and is weighing curbs on ⁠solar manufacturing equipment exports to the United States.

The pattern speaks to something more than reactive tit-for-tat, experts say, with China ⁠using the trade truce to build ⁠out a menu of economic influence tools that was, until recently, almost exclusively Washington's domain ahead of a planned summit between Xi and Trump in mid-May.

"The ‌hope on the Chinese side is for a longer lasting, more broadly rooted truce, but it's very much that 'if you want peace, prepare for war' logic," said ⁠Joe Mazur, geopolitics analyst at Beijing-based consultancy........

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