Bloomberg News
Chinese President Xi Jinping could almost have been mistaken for Roy Cohn, or a Cohn acolyte such as Roger Stone or Donald Trump, in his recent remarks before an audience of executives — including American and European heads of multinational companies, according to a Wall Street Journal report — at an event in Beijing:
‘In the West you have the notion that if somebody hits you on the left cheek, you turn the other cheek. In our culture we punch back.’
Having spurned the notion of turning the other cheek, biblical in its origin, the Chinese president-for-life claims for his culture a preference for striking back at adversaries, echoing the late Trump lawyer Cohn, perhaps best known as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the Wisconsin Republican’s 1950s crusade against alleged communists. “Always hit back,” goes one oft-quoted Cohn commandment.
Xi, in specific, was giving voice to China’s willingness to retaliate against the Trump administration’s hitting out at traditional U.S. allies and rivals alike over trade imbalances and, in President Trump’s stated view, the unfair conditions that allow those gaps to obtain.