Why China shouldn’t let a good trade war go to waste

“Never waste a good crisis.” The term has been variously attributed to Renaissance Italian diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and former US President Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. It’s surely one that Chinese President Xi Jinping and his coterie of Communist Party officials must be considering as the country’s trade war with the US lurches onwards. From a macroeconomic perspective it has been a painful experience for China. It ha…