Responding to Trump's tariffs, the spokesperson of China's foreign ministry, Mao Ning, posted a video of one of Mao Zedong's speeches during the Korean War.
"We are Chinese. We are not afraid of provocations. We don’t back down," the founder of modern-day China, said in the black and white clip from 1953.
Washington should see this as a signal from Beijing, says Isabel Hilton, founder of the China Dialogue think tank.
"When Beijing starts quoting Mao Zedong from the period of the Korean War, when China was again fighting the United States, we can pretty much bet that they're not going to give in easily," Hilton tells the BBC's Newshour programme.
"If Xi Jinping is going to go to the negotiating table, which they've always said they would, he wants to go from a position of strength. So China is going to try and inflict maximum damage on the United States before they talk," she says.
