Ye Fangsu, a retired Shanghai schoolteacher, doesn’t need any lessons about the dangers of trade wars. For nearly 60 years, she has lived in the former French Concession, a leafy part of Shanghai whose name itself carries the humiliation of China’s biggest trade war. The “concession” was one of many slices of territory, including Hong Kong and parts of other port cities, that China was forced to hand over to foreign powers after its defeat in the mid-19th-century Opium Wars. “China was so weak and backward then,” Ye said, shaking her head as she offered me slices of apple and pear on a hot July afternoon. “We had to give in.”

The first salvos of today’s trade war have barely been felt yet in China. But for many Chinese, there’s a sense of history repeating itself. The Opium Wars, as every Chinese schoolchild is reminded, began as a British attempt to pry open the Chinese market. Much as it does today, China in the 17th and 18th centuries ran a huge trade surplus with the West, exporting large quantities of tea, porcelain and silk but importing little in return. (It balanced its current-account surplus by buying up loads of Latin American silver; these days, Beijing has piled up $1.2 trillion in United States government securities.) By hooking China on opium, British and American merchants redressed the trade imbalance even as they weakened the country’s social fabric. The Chinese revolted, but they were no match for Western gunboats — leading to the unequal treaties that have fueled China’s sense of historical grievance and patriotic ambitions ever since.

Ye Fangsu was a teenager in 1949 when Mao Zedong’s Communist troops marched into Shanghai, the vanguard of a revolution that vowed to end China’s “century of humiliation.” Now 84 and widowed, Ye says she was “angry” when she learned from state-run media about the United States’ punitive trade tariffs on Chinese products. “It just seems like the foreigners are bullying us again,” she told me. But this time will be different, she said, pointing out that rather than panic or surrender, China’s leaders announced a reciprocal “counterattack” aimed at products, like soybeans and pork, meant to hit the heart of President Donald Trump’s rural base. “We’ve become strong now, and our leaders are more tenacious. They won’t back down.”