Trump and Miss Havisha's wedding cake

I had hoped to write about something other than President Trumps relentless trade war with China but this week's announcement of additional tariffs on Chinese goods means that the trade war remains front and center.

On the surface Trump would have us believe that this tariff war is about unfair trading practices and the loss of American jobs. That's a great story for the unsophisticated American farmer and steel worker, with the former now benefiting from Depression-era farm subsidies.

If we accept this narrative at face value then investors can adjust their portfolio and investment strategies to minimize any immediate harm, or reap some transitory benefits.

Dig a bit deeper, and the situation is more dangerous. This is a direct challenge to Chinese sense of nation and face. From this perspective the investment and business solutions look very different.

Trumps tariff wars with China have a subtext. They are predicated on the belief that no country has the right to challenge Americas supremacy in a variety of fields.

The battle for supremacy in 5G communications is but one example. It is beyond question that China is the world leader in 5G communications development. America is struggling to catch up, so its response is to cripple the competition and demand that China stop making progress.

Huawei is a world 5G leader so the US and its allies concoct a series of allegations. Huawei, and by implication, every advanced Chinese company, is a national security risk. The competition is crippled by regulations and innuendo.

Then the US demands that China abandon its quest to become a world leader in Artificial Intelligence. Why? This is no less than a demand that a country stop its economic and intellectual development! It's a policy designed to keep China 'dumb' and dependent upon the US.

China has a million or more highly qualified graduates working on research and development. It's a nonsense to believe that all these graduates are trying to improve the quality of counterfeit handbags or focus on ways to steal US secrets. Research and development is about advancing current applications, not copying them. That's the reason Huawei is now the second largest smartphone manufacturer behind Apple, despite being virtually locked out of the world's biggest economy. It's because it's a competition won by innovative features, not by copy products.

In the mid-nineteenth century the Western powers "demanded" China submit to treaty ports and pay massive compensation for having the audacity to resist the state-sanctioned illegal trade in drugs.

What followed has been seared into the Chinese consciousness in the same way as the right to carry guns is part of the US consciousness. China will not forget and this remembrance shapes China's response to the current American bullying approach. Its these responses that will shape the investment and business environment and its these responses we need to start evaluating if our business is to grow. This is more than just a tariff tiff.

Trump, like Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations, lives in the past, looking at a cake long past its use-by date. Our engagement with China cannot make the same mistake.

Daryl Guppy, president of the Northern Territory office of the Australia China Business Council.

The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not represent the views of China Daily and China Daily website.