China has published a piece on the Global Times website threatening members of the Quad that the communist nation can “retaliate economically if red line crossed.” The Quad is a partnership between the US, Australia, Japan and India. They are meeting this week to talk about trade and other issues in the Indo-Pacific region.

“The Quad is the centerpiece of the so-called Indo-Pacific Strategy, and the framework will play a greater role in the Biden administration’s efforts to contain China,” Ni Feng, deputy director of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Thursday.

China has been quick to point out that trade has had a major realignment in the last few years.

China surpassed the US as the EU’s largest trading partner in 2020. With the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) making progress while the future of transatlantic trade remains unclear, experts say bilateral ties between China and EU members will be further cemented in 2021.

That is more or less just a poke in the eye to the Trump administration. The shifting of the trade between countries was bound to rebalance after were placed on products coming out of China.

They also didn’t hide the fact that this was in fact a threat. The closing paragraph of the article spells out pretty clearly what the consequences are:

China needs to make full use of its economic cards to counter possible provocations, Ni noted, given that one of the Quad members, Australia, has already tasted what it feels like as an anti-China pioneer.

China and Australia have been locked in a trade dispute for most of the last year.

Dr Jeffrey Wilson, the research director at the Perth USAsia Centre at the University of Western Australia, said while the tensions between China and Australia had brought the issue to a head, “this is a global economic fight that has been brewing for a decade”.

“The China-Australia events have brought home to us that this is something that Australia is increasingly going to face: economic coercion by larger powers that will hurt our economy and hurt society,” he said in an interview.

With the cozy relationship that the Biden’s have with China, and the hold that the communist regime has over Washington, I bet we end up losing our shirts somehow. The economic gains that we have made by rebalancing trade with China may be in jeopardy.