It’s not often the case, but this is a week when the hard-working spokespeople for China’s foreign ministry have a pretty easy job.

The trade war between the United States and China is escalating rapidly. In February, President Trump imposed 20 percent tariffs on China as punishment for fentanyl trafficking. Last Thursday, he added 34 percent tariffs. When China retaliated with an import tax of its own, Trump imposed an additional 50 percent tariff, which would bring the total rate to a staggering 104 percent.

Internationally, however, there’s a silver lining.

In an initial statement responding to the tariffs that Trump announced last week, China’s foreign ministry accused the US of violating WTO rules and undermining the global economic order, promising that China “will only continue to open its doors wider, regardless of the changing international landscape.”

On Monday, spokesperson Lin Jian posted a message pitched to countries in the Global South, writing, “The latest US tariff hikes will essentially deprive countries of their right to development.”

He added: “Countries need to come together to uphold true multilateralism, oppose unilateralism and protectionism of all forms, and safeguard the international order.”

It’s striking to read these defenses of the “international order.” In recent years, senior US officials and influential commentators have portrayed China as the centerpiece of an “axis of upheaval,” seeking to overthrow the “prevailing world order and its US leadership.”

In 2005, then-Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick gave a widely circulated speech urging China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. The speech has often been held up as the height of naivete, given the years of US-China tensions that followed, but today the charge has been turned around.

The message coming from Beijing now is that the real threat to the US-led international system is coming from inside the house. It’s not only Communist Party functionaries that are starting to see the world this way. As the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf wrote last week, “In today’s world, the US is a revolutionary — more precisely, a reactionary — power, while supposedly communist China is a status quo power.”

“China is positioning itself as the responsible global power,” said Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and former senior adviser for China at the Commerce Department. “It’s basically getting a free pass here from the United States.”

The question is to what extent China will be able to capitalize on that pass.

Xi’s opening

The Trump administration does not appear to have taken political or strategic implications into account with its tariffs, which were determined by a blanket formula. (The possible exception of Russia, which received no tariffs at all, ostensibly because it is already under heavy US sanctions and does little business with the US — though that’s also true of a number of countries that were included),

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