While China will suffer from a trade war with the United States, some experts say the Asian giant has more resilience than the U.S. The "Chinese government has plenty of financial resources to step in," said Arthur Kroeber, founding partner of Hong Kong-based financial services and research firm Gavekal Dragonomics. "I think the Chinese government has looked at this and is prepared to act," Kroeber said, speaking by phone from Beijing. In the last few decades, the communist government in Beijing has built China into the world's second-largest economy with a state-backed form of capitalism and has expanded the nation's global reach. A large portion of that growth came from heavy-handed policies that favored domestic industries, displaced more than a million people for infrastructure projects and generated questionably high levels of debt.





But key to China's rise has been access to the global market, particularly the U.S. consumer. And in the very near term, that makes the Asian giant vulnerable to increased tensions with the U.S.

China was the largest source of goods imported to the U.S.in 2015, according to an estimate from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The U.S. goods trade deficit with China was $366 billion in 2015, meaning the U.S. bought far more from China than the other way around. "If there is a full-fledged trade war, China is going to get hurt disproportionately to the U.S.," said Jacob Shapiro, director of analysis at Geopolitical Futures, an online publication that analyzes and forecasts the course of global events. "It's not really about what China wants. China needs access to the U.S. consumer market," Shapiro said. He doesn't expect tensions to escalate into a trade war.