Truth also first casualty in trade war

Recently, US academic Yasheng Huang posed the question in The Wall Street Journal: "Jack Ma is retiring. Is China's economy losing steam?" By the same logic, Elon Musk's forced stepdown as chairman of Tesla should prompt the question is the US economy experiencing a slowdown.

Similarly, Bloomberg columnist Nisha Gopalan claims that the campaign against corrupt business oligarchs in China signals economic weakness, despite corruption's corrosive impact on the private economy. And, Gordon F. Chang, who authored The Coming Collapse of China in 2001 when the Chinese economy was about to grow sixfold in a decade, argues that US tariffs against all Chinese imports are "necessary".

It is often said that the first casualty of war is truth. That clearly applies in a trade war as well. What is odd is not that times of peril offer opportunities to ideologists, or ideologies to opportunists, but that, despite their repeatedly flawed predictions and prejudice bias, partisan oracles continue to be given ample space in major global media.