SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Imagine a cluster of buildings the size of a hundred football fields.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DETROW: Now imagine more than 20,000 businesses inside hawking their wares to another 200,000 potential customers.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
DETROW: This is the Canton Fair in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, the biggest trade show in the world.
JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: If it's made in China, you can get it there - hair dryers, headphones, hard hats, tools, tractors, yarn, electric wires - everything.
DETROW: And this is John Ruwitch, a correspondent who covers China for NPR.
RUWITCH: One booth we went to had this sound.
(SOUNDBITE OF ELECTRIC CLICKING)
RUWITCH: And we went and checked it out, and it's these electric - like, they look like tennis rackets. They're electric bug zappers.
DETROW: John has been to the Canton Fair numerous times over the decades he has covered China, but this year, it was different.
RUWITCH: I've sometimes had difficulty getting people to open up. And this time, everybody was willing to talk, pretty much.
DETROW: It was mid-April, about a week after President Trump's so-called Liberation Day, when he put tariffs on just about every country on Earth, with China receiving the highest tariffs by far. It was a seismic shock to many people at the Canton Fair, including Steven Zhong (ph), sales manager for a minioven manufacturer.
STEVEN ZHONG: (Non-English language spoken).
RUWITCH: Then he told me at the time that 90% of his business comes from the U.S. And so after the tariffs were jacked up to 145%, they shut down. They had an executive meeting and then basically told all the workers - I think he said they have 100 workers or something like that - to go home, their pay would be cut, and they moved into a wait-and-see mode.
DETROW: That uncertainty would continue for about a month, until earlier this week when the U.S. and China reached a new agreement to lower tariffs. So a couple of days ago, John and his producer checked back in with Steven Zhong.
RUWITCH: They got the factory back up to about 70- or 80% of capacity, put 90% of the workers back on the factory line.
DETROW: That quickly?
RUWITCH: That quickly - they just turned around, called these people up apparently, and said, come back into work. But he says they lost about half of their U.S. clients in this. Smaller companies went out of business. People haven't been placing orders. Interestingly, for the products that he makes, they still face a 50% tariff, which is quite high. He says, the future - you know, they're up and running again, but the future is uncertain.
DETROW: This is the whiplash of trying to run a business in China during this ongoing trade war. It's also the whiplash of trying to cover China as a foreign correspondent right now. So today, for our weekly Reporter's Notebook segment, John Ruwitch takes us behind the scenes as he tries to make sense of this unprecedented moment.
I'm glad we're talking to you right now because the U.S.-China trade relationship is one of the biggest stories in the world right now. And I will say, like, this is not an area I have extensively covered, and I often find it hard to comprehend. But you have been covering this for a really long time. You've been covering it up close. You understand these scenes. I want you to take us to a different scene that you've reported on, another side of the Chinese economy, an auto show in Shanghai. Tell us what you saw there.
RUWITCH: Yes. A few weeks ago, we went to the Shanghai Auto Show, which happens once every two years. This is another one of those things where it's an event in China that's laced with superlatives. This is one of the biggest car shows in the world. The place where it's being held might even be bigger than where the Canton Fair is held. It's just this vast location.
But what we saw there is the biggest car market in the world revving on all cylinders, right? It's ironic 'cause there's no cylinders, right? It's the biggest EV market in the world. NEVs now make up more than 50% of new cars sold in China. In the U.S., by comparison, it's under 20%. And this technology in Shanghai at this car show was on full display. There were drones for cars. There were cars that looked like drones. There were flat screens everywhere. You know where the side mirror is on a car? Like, apparently, the thing that's coming - and I don't know if U.S. regulations allow this yet - but in China, it's a camera now that aims back down the side of the car, and there's a little screen on the side that you look at.
DETROW: So it's not a mirror. It's just digital?
RUWITCH: It's digital. Yeah.
DETROW: Wow. That would be disorienting. I don't know if I need that technology.
RUWITCH: (Laughter) You'll need it.
DETROW: Yeah.
RUWITCH: You don't know it now, but you will need it.
DETROW: In 10 years, I'll be like, oh, I couldn't live without this.
RUWITCH: I can't believe I didn't have this. But, you know, there were American brands there - Chrysler, Ford, Cadillac was there - but they were vastly outnumbered by Chinese brands. And I guess, ultimately, what that says about China - the economy is complex. It faces hurdles. But you really get the - there is real strong entrepreneurial spirit, hustle that you see at these trade shows, which, again, are just a slice of life in a country like this. But you can feel it there.
DETROW: Let's back up a bit. How long have you been reporting in China at this point?
RUWITCH: Oh, yeah. My first reporting assignment to China was in 2001.
DETROW: Wow. So you've been there a while, and there has been drastic, drastic, drastic change in this country over the time that you've been reporting on it.
RUWITCH: Yes, that's safe to say.
DETROW: I think, like, as a foreign correspondent, you're trying to do two things that are really tricky, and I want to talk about them one at a time. The first is trying to report as an American journalist for an American news outlet. You're trying to report in a country where NPR is not necessarily top of mind. The American news ecosystem is not necessarily top of mind. And, you know, there's, at times, an adversarial, tense relationship between the U.S. and China. Can you tell us how you go about your reporting, how you frame things, how you're typically received by people when you introduce yourself?
RUWITCH: Yeah, I have to say that people in China are generally quite warm when they - when I introduce myself, when they learn that I'm American. The ease of reporting there varies. Sometimes it can be quite difficult and hostile. It can be a challenging environment. It depends on the story. It depends on the political sensitivities at the moment. It depends on the timing.
In 2023, they launched - the government launched an antiespionage campaign, and I remember, you know, a couple of people that we reached out to or attempted to talk to - one or two people were unwilling. They just couldn't trust us. Late in the COVID period when China was still lockdown, the rest of the world was open, there was great frustration in the country. People seemed very open to venting their frustration to us.
DETROW: All right, so that is one of the big challenges of being a foreign correspondent. And the other, I think, is - in a way, is harder, actually, and that is taking this really complicated story that you live in and experience every single day and telling it in a way that brings our audience along if they haven't been closely following it, also trying to make it compelling and interesting and tell an engaging story. And that can be tricky, especially when you're so in deep on a complicated story. How do you think about your pieces when you're sitting down to write them?
RUWITCH: Yeah. There's two sides of this. One is that there's news that needs to be covered. There's geopolitics. There's macroeconomics. There's political, you know, change wherever, right? In parts of China, there's events that happen which we need to cover. Beyond that, I think at NPR, we have kind of a special position - right? - in - within Western media, within the U.S. media, in that we can put voices of people from afar into the ears of American listeners.
So to the greatest extent possible, I'm searching for - and in China, looked for - personal stories. And so one of the things that I've tried to do is pretty simple, but it's to tell stories featuring interesting people, maybe ordinary people, and getting their voices on the air so that American audiences hear them and recognize humans on the other side of the globe. I had a fascinating conversation with a disabled poet a few months ago who was branching out into dance, actually. We saw her dance show.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
YU XIUHUA: (Non-English language spoken).
RUWITCH: The stage is a very long way from Yu's roots in a farming village in central China. But Yu has been catapulted to unlikely national fame by poems like...
We traveled to this far-flung sort of part of the center, the sort of west, sort of central part of the country, to the Yangtze River where we interviewed a guy who was playing piano to sort of process his grief from the pandemic.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
PENG HAITAO: (Through interpreter) In the summer of 2022, I dreamt of my father. I really missed him. He'd been gone over two years, and I wanted to do something for him because nobody talked about him anymore.
RUWITCH: He decided to perform the song in public on the street.
(SOUNDBITE OF PENG HAITAO PERFORMANCE OF RYUICHI SAKAMOTO'S "MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE")
DETROW: So you said you filed your first story around 2001 or so, but that wasn't the first time you were in China. You'd been there - what? - a decade before for the first time?
RUWITCH: My first trip to China was in '92. And yeah, I went to the city of Kunming in southern China, in the - in Yunnan province. And it was a different place back then, I tell you.
DETROW: I mean, what is the best way to think about to envision just how much this country has changed since you first experienced it, first - since you first started reporting on it today?
RUWITCH: I mean, China's economy back then was 2-, 3% the size of what it is today, something like that. The reform and opening and the Chinese economic miracle, quote-unquote, as we know it today, hadn't even really started then. I know that reform and opening started at the end of the '70s, but it got - it hit a big speed bump in 1989 after the crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square. There were bike - there was bikes everywhere. Everybody talks about, oh, there used to be bikes everywhere. There were bikes everywhere. Nobody had a personal car. People dreamed of having a personal car back then. And now Shanghai auto show.
DETROW: So that's looking backward. So much is changing. You have these big, long-term technological trends. You have these big, long-term economic trends. You have this trade war that we truly don't know how it's going to turn out. Given all that, like, what do you think is next? What do you think is the next big story, the story you have the biggest questions, about when it comes to China and its economy?
RUWITCH: Scott, are you asking for investment advice?
DETROW: (Laughter) If I am, then we have to do one of those fun disclaimers at the end. Like...
RUWITCH: (Laughter) I mean, this place and the economy - you know the parable of the blind men touching the elephant, right? Each touches a different part. It's a different - it's different where you look.
So I don't know what's next. You know, going back to 1992, my first trip there, or 2001, when I moved there as a journalist with Reuters, there was always this sense of confidence in the future, confidence that China was getting better, confidence that, you know, my life today is 10 times better than my parents' life, my parents' life was 10 times better than their parents life, and my kids' life is going to be 10 times better than mine.
I think that has been challenged in people's minds. And if and when that can get turned around, unlocked, if they can reinvigorate that confidence in the future of the Chinese economy, great, for the economy. If not, it's a more complex place to cover, to think about, to make predictions about.
DETROW: Yeah. John Ruwitch, NPR's China correspondent, I always enjoy it when we take our conversations off Slack. Thanks for explaining your beat to us.
RUWITCH: I'm happy to do it. Good to chat with you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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