China, the United States’ top global rival, is cultivating an extensive relationship with one of America’s key allies.
Page F2From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 2 September 2026
Bessent accuses China of flooding world markets with cheap exports as Xi tours Egypt seeking deeper influence.
As it ran on the front
Let's run the filing against the table. At the G20, the Treasury Secretary told the room that China is flooding world markets with cheap exports. Also at the table, filed the same week: the president of China touring Egypt, described by his own state coverage as seeking deeper influence across the Middle East. Two filings, one ledger.
Here is what the ledger does not show: a tariff schedule that has actually slowed the flow of the exports being complained about. It does not show a domestic manufacturing subsidy sized to match the complaint. It shows a speech. Speeches are free. Cheap exports, by definition, are also cheap. The gap between the two is where the actual policy would go if there were one.…
…(cont) Reconcile it this way. When a company undercuts a competitor on price, the competitor has two options: match the price, or change what it's competing on. The United States, in this filing, chose neither — it chose to file a complaint at a meeting, which is the accounting equivalent of writing yourself an IOU and calling it revenue. Meanwhile the counterparty in the dispute was, on the same news day, in Cairo, signing the kind of relationship-building that doesn't show up as flooding — it shows up later, as a port contract, a loan, a vote at the UN.
The word 'flooding' is doing a lot of work in that first filing. It implies an accident, water finding the low ground. It was not an accident. It was a pricing decision, made by a government running an export economy, responded to by a government that has spent forty years subsidizing the industries now undercut, and the response filed at the G20 was a sentence.
I don't have a subsidy number to give you today, hon — that filing wasn't attached. What I have is the sequence: complaint in one hemisphere, contract in another, same week, same ledger. The gap doesn't close itself, and it doesn't close in a speech. It closes when somebody puts a number next to the complaint, and nobody, as of this filing, has.
“Every few months Washington finds a new country to blame for cheap stuff on the shelf, and it's never the shelf's fault. Xi's out here handing out infrastructure and goodwill in Cairo while our Treasury Secretary is at a podium complaining about the price tag, like the two aren't related. One side's building relationships, the other's building talking points, and only one of those shows up on a receipt in ten years.”
“Look, standing up to unfair trade practices is exactly what American workers deserve — a level playing field, tariffs where necessary, a strong dollar. And it's not like previous administrations, of either party, might have also, um, kept prices low for consumers by leaning on those same cheap imports — that's not — forget I said that, the point is Bessent is being tough at the podium.”
The receipts
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent accused China for flooding the world with its cheap exports.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.