When the Trump administration’s opening trade-talks demands were leaked in May last year, the outrage many Chinese people felt was genuine. Friedrich Wu, a professor at NTU in Singapore, sums up the feelings of many when he describes them as “a list of surrender demands for China to acquiesce to. “It’s a (reversion) to the 19th century when western and Japanese powers dictated all the terms in their humiliating unequal treaties with a feeble Qing dynasty,” he says.