China channels Chairman Mao in trade war with a vow for ‘complete victory’ over the U.S.

China responded on Thursday that while it does not want to fight a trade war, it also won’t shy away from one.

“We are Chinese. We are not afraid of provocations. We don’t back down,” Mao Ning, spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Thursday in a post on X.

The post also included archival footage of Mao Zedong, who founded the People’s Republic of China, speaking in 1953 when the United States and China were on opposite sides of the Korean War.

“As for how long the war should last, I think we shouldn’t decide that,” says Mao, who led China for more than a quarter of a century until his death in 1976.

“In the past, it was decided by Truman. In the future, it will be decided by Eisenhower — or whoever the president of the United States may be. In other words, they can fight for as long as they want — until China’s complete victory,” he continues in the video, which is subtitled in Chinese and English.

In another apparent reference to Trump’s tariffs, Mao also shared an illustration of a “Make America Great Again” hat — which are made in countries such as China, Vietnam and Bangladesh — bearing a “Made in China” label and sitting above a $50 price tag crossed out and replaced with $77.

A hashtag about the Mao Zedong post was trending Thursday on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media platform.

“We shouldn’t hold on to any illusion that America will go easy on China,” one user wrote. “Let Trump make the call — however long they want to fight, we’ll fight.”

The Chinese Commerce Ministry did not say whether it would further raise tariffs on U.S. goods in response to Trump’s latest increase. The door to talks “is always open,” a spokesperson said Thursday, “but any dialogue must be based on mutual respect and conducted on equal footing.”

Underlying such comments is China’s history of exploitation by Western nations, memories of which remain searing even as China has leveraged globalization to become the world’s largest trading nation in goods.

Even though U.S. and Chinese tariffs are already at “trade-prohibitive” levels, Trump’s public calls to negotiate are unlikely to work with China, said Rick Waters, a former State Department diplomat who is now the Singapore-based director of Carnegie China.