It's starting to smell like a real trade war.

Just days after the WSJ reported that Scott Bessent's grand trade war strategy was to force more than 70 US trade partners to sign bilateral deals while aligning against China, Beijing has warned it will retaliate against countries that negotiate trade deals with the US “at the expense of China’s interests”, fueling global tensions as the world’s two economic superpowers lunge at each other over tariffs.

“China firmly opposes any party reaching a deal at the expense of China’s interests,” the ministry said on Monday. “If this happens, China will never accept it and will resolutely take countermeasures in a reciprocal manner.”

“China respects the right of all parties to resolve their economic and trade differences with the United States through equal consultations,” the commerce ministry said adding that if countries encroached on Beijing’s interests, it was “determined and capable of safeguarding its own rights”.

The ministry added that “all parties should stand on the side of fairness and justice and should defend international economic and trade rules and the multilateral trading system”.

It said: “Once international trade returns to the ‘law of the jungle’, where the strong prey on the weak, all countries will become victims.”

The statement by China's commerce ministry, which was in response to reports that Trump’s administration planned to use trade talks with multiple countries to try to isolate China, called on them to instead join Beijing to “resist unilateral bullying."

The sharp escalation follows the failure to gain any traction in trade and tariff negotiations. Trump has called several times for Beijing to open negotiations to avert a trade war, and China has said it is open to talks, but neither side has signalled that high-level contacts are under way.

While last week's WSJ report said the US strategy to gang up on China was intended to pressure Beijing to come to the negotiating table and abandon its defiant stance, China has shown little sign of backing down. Instead, president Xi Jinping visited Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia last week, where he sought to shore up relations with Beijing’s trading partners.

South-east Asian exporters face steep tariffs under the Trump administration, which has also accused them of serving as a transshipment conduit for Chinese goods. Unfortunately for them, without the US as a final customer for most of their exports (including Chinese transshipments), and vows of solidarity will be hollow once countless Pacific rim factories go dark sparking an economic and labor crisis in countries which have virtually no social safety net.

And while China has ironically sought to portray itself as a pillar of the international trading system, it is struggling with weak domestic demand following a deep property slowdown, forcing policymakers to lean on manufacturing and exports for economic growth and leaving the economy vulnerable to the trade war with the US. As a reminder, some 40% of Chinese economic growth is in the form of trade, and while the hit to the US would be mostly along the inflationary and capital market pathways, once more than a third of China's economy is forced to find new end markets,  the pain for the domestic economic will be orders of magnitude worse.

It's also why Goldman now expects China's Q2 real GDP growth to collapse to 0.8% qoq ann from 4.9% in Q1.

Meanwhile, Beijing has repeatedly promised various initiatives to spur consumption but has held back from launching a “bazooka” fiscal stimulus (something it can't do since it has hit debt saturation), instead investing heavily in industry to shake off its reliance on western technology.