JUST a week into what could prove a long and grinding trade war launched against China by the United States, a curious feature of the conflict has already emerged: China will not, for now at least, dip into its traditional armoury of rhetorical bluster and belligerence. That marks a break with usual Communist Party propaganda, and even with its rhetoric of a few weeks ago.

Then, the language was much more uncompromising. And as recently as June, according to the Wall Street Journal, in a meeting with a score of mainly American and European executives, President Xi Jinping promised a bare-knuckle approach in countering President Donald Trump’s punitive tariffs, the first of which, on $34bn of imported Chinese machinery and electronic parts, kicked in on July 6th. “In the West you have a notion that if somebody hits you on the left cheek, you turn the other cheek,” he reportedly said. “In our culture we punch back.”

In terms of trade responses, China is now bearing that assertion out. It has imposed tariffs on an equivalent value of American goods, including sports-utility vehicles, pork and soyabeans. It promises tough responses to further American moves—this week the Trump administration released details of possible tariffs of 10% to be imposed on another $200bn of Chinese goods.

Yet in terms of language, including what the state allows Chinese netizens to say online, a shift has occurred. Triumphalism and jingoism are out. One scrap of evidence came on July 6th. As the noon tariff deadline loomed, Chinese social media were gripped by the progress of Peak Pegasus, a ship with a consignment of American soyabeans steaming to reach Dalian port before the deadline. Much of the commentary was lighthearted, urging the hapless soyabeans on. But censors were quick to delete anti-American sentiment. In the event, the vessel arrived too late.

More substantive are the instructions issued to media outlets by China’s propaganda authorities. China Digital Times, a California-based website, reports one such directive. In it, publications are told not to attack Mr Trump’s “vulgarity”, nor to engage in “a war of insults”. It repeats high officials’ calls for “calm and rationality”. Other diktats caution against conveying any sense of Chinese superiority, or claims that China can easily crush America in a trade war. Yet other instructions urge the press to play down China’s plan for global dominance in various technological sectors, known as “Made in China 2025”. It is almost as if officials are promoting a return to the late Deng Xiaoping’s dictum that China should keep a low profile.

There are several possible reasons for this shift. Financial and economic vulnerability is the most obvious one. A trade war need not be disastrous. China’s economy depends less on exports than it used to, and the proportion of China’s total trade threatened by tariffs remains relatively small (see chart). Yet China’s indebted economy was already slowing before the trade war. Jitters leading to capital outflows could threaten a financial crisis. On no account, say the leaked instructions, should falls in the stockmarket be linked to the trade conflict. Keep calm and carry on. Accentuate the positive.

A related motivation must surely be to avoid a staple of Chinese economic warfare: consumer boycotts. These erupted against Japanese businesses in 2012 and against a South Korean supermarket chain last year, both preceded by belligerent signalling in state propaganda. A large-scale anti-American boycott now would greatly raise political tensions. And given how interconnected the two economies are, it would hurt plenty of Chinese firms, too. For example, a Chinese state entity controls McDonald’s franchises in the country. Overseas, China wishes to win allies in its war by appearing statesmanlike, an image that would be undermined by shrill rhetoric—or too many reminders, in the shape of “Made in China 2025”, that it is bidding to overtake America. Yanmei Xie of Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm in Beijing, says China wants to be seen as the defender of the global trade order and so claim the moral high ground. Chinese officials will play that card at a summit next week in China’s capital with the European Union. They hope to peel away America’s European allies (see article). The Europeans are also targets of Mr Trump’s trade offensive. But whether they will oblige China is another matter. They resent Mr Trump’s attacks on them, and disagree with his approach to China. But they are as frustrated as America is with China’s barriers to investment and its plundering of Western technology. There is another factor, only rarely hinted at: the hallowed status in China of Mr Xi himself. For months and months the country’s dictator has been built up not only as a domestic superhero, but as an international statesman of genius. Last autumn government employees across the country were ordered to watch a six-part television series about China’s emergence as a world power. In it Mr Xi, in the starring role, gets fawning praise. Robert Mugabe, before his fall from power in Zimbabwe, calls him “a God-sent person”. Mr Trump talks of his “great chemistry” with Mr Xi. In an article published at the same time, the foreign minister, Wang Yi, declared that his boss had “blazed new trails and gone beyond traditional Western international-relations theory of the past 300 years.”

In May a journal put out by the Central Party School ran a lead article titled “Extraordinary Leader: A Study of the International Praise for the Super-Strong Leadership of Xi Jinping in the New Era”. The journal called for systematic study of the accolades Mr Xi had earned—a School of Sycophantology, as David Bandurski, co-director of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, puts it.

China’s fear may now be that if frictions worsen with America, Mr Xi could be blamed at home for mishandling a crucial relationship. Criticising America too fiercely, as Yun Sun at the Stimson Centre, a think-tank in Washington, puts it, would suggest to ordinary Chinese that China had failed to outmanoeuvre Mr Trump. That, she says, means the finger points at Mr Xi—“not a happy scenario”.

Also unwelcome would be the public tongue-lashings Mr Xi might face from an American president who is currently all sweetness and light in his personal expressions towards China’s leader. Hence the warnings against over-confidence and pleas for a humble demeanour. Early this month the People’s Daily railed against “repeated boastfulness and arrogance…which have hurt the credibility of the media” and “twisted the national psyche”. The paper attacked online articles that “exaggerate and generalise and shout” about China’s accomplishments. Yet it failed to point out that encouragement to do so had long come from the very top. And, as Mr Bandurski puts it, the genie of hype and triumphalism may not in the end be so easy to coax back into the lamp.