A telegenic young woman called Luna is standing on the floor of a warehouse stacked with shipping boxes and sacks the color of sun-washed jade. When the video opens, she does a jumping half twist to face the camera and says, in smooth British-accented English, “There’s nothing a Chinese factory can’t make.” Garment factories in Guangdong, she explains, are vital production partners for American brands like Brooks Brothers and Tommy Hilfiger. “The scale of the factories in this region specifically, they’re not massive,” she says, doing a practiced walk-and-talk. “But all of them are willing to invest heavily in research and development.”

一名自称露娜（音）的上镜年轻女子站在仓库里，周围堆满运输箱和翡翠色麻袋。视频开始时，她做了个半圈旋转跳，面对镜头，用流利的英式英语说：“没有中国工厂不能造的东西。”她解释说，广东的服装厂是布克兄弟和汤米·希尔费格等美国品牌的重要生产合作伙伴，。“就这个具体地区而言，工厂规模并不大，”她以娴熟的边走边说方式说道，“但它们都愿意在研发上投入巨资。”

I started seeing videos like this one as I scrolled social media from my couch in the days after President Trump announced his sweeping new tariffs — Liberation Day, if you must — in early April. TikTok, in particular, was flooded with videos of young Chinese people, speaking from warehouses and factories in Guangdong and Shenzhen, in footage that reminded me of low-budget TV ads for local businesses. In one, a woman called Rosie — looking worried, as if trying to stop someone from making a huge mistake — struck poses while telling viewers which websites they could use to buy sportswear or appliances directly from Chinese manufacturers.

今年4月初，特朗普总统宣布了范围广泛的新关税——如果非得用他的说法，也就是所谓解放日——随后，我在沙发上浏览社交媒体时开始看到这种视频。具体地说，TikTok上充斥着中国年轻人在广东、深圳等地的仓库和工厂里对着镜头讲话的视频，让我想起那些为本地企业拍摄的低成本电视广告。在一段视频里，一个自称罗西的女子面带忧容，仿佛在试图阻止某人犯下一个大错。她一边摆出各种姿势，一边告诉观众可以通过哪些网站直接从中国制造商那里购买运动服或家电。

Americans had already been doing that for years. There are enormous communities on Reddit dedicated to connecting with Chinese proxy buyers, where WhatsApp numbers are traded like samizdat: You can text a stranger somewhere in China, get a menu of goods and order with a few clicks on PayPal. There are drop-shippers, too, a cottage industry of people who take orders through e-commerce sites, then have foreign manufacturers send the items directly to customers. You could even cut out the middlemen and contact a factory yourself. All this was enabled, in part, by a de minimis tariff exemption, in which goods worth less than $800 could be shipped from China or Hong Kong directly to the consumer without paying duties. But Trump ended that exception this year — and, of course, he also slapped almost all Chinese imports with a tariff of at least 145 percent.

美国人早就已经这样做了。Reddit上有专门帮找中国代购的巨大社区，在那里，WhatsApp账号像地下出版物一样被交易，它让人能给中国某个地方的陌生人发短信，获取商品清单，然后点几下PayPal付款下单。还有代发货商，这是一种家庭小作坊，他们通过电商网站接单，然后让外国的制造商直接把商品发给客户。人们甚至可以省掉中间商，自己去联系工厂。所有这些交易都一定程度上得益于“小额豁免”——价值低于800美元的商品能从中国或香港直接寄送到消费者手中，无需缴纳关税。但特朗普在今年取消了这一政策，当然，他还对几乎所有的中国进口商品加征了至少145%的关税。（根据两国后来达成的协议，目前美国已将对中国商品的关税从145%下调至30%，中国则将对美国商品的关税从125%降至10%。——编注）

Now Chinese manufacturers and American consumers both face tariff-induced anxieties — and so the flow of communication between them seems to be deepening. The videos I saw last month seemed to want to negotiate new trade arrangements directly with American consumers, peer to peer, outside official channels. They pitched factory-direct savings that might defray some of the rising costs of goods. Americans, they wagered, had found it easier to change their politics than their Amazon wish lists.

中国的制造商和美国的消费者们现在都面临着关税引发的焦虑，双方之间的沟通似乎也因此加深。我上个月看到的这些视频似乎是想绕过官方渠道，建立点对点的关系，来与美国消费者直接谈判达成一种新的贸易方式。这些视频的卖点是工厂直销的优惠，这也许能部分缓解商品涨价的影响。它们押注，对美国人来说，改变政治立场比起改变亚马逊愿望清单更容易。

That these videos might find a receptive audience among young Americans isn’t surprising. In this year’s edition of the Harvard Youth Poll, 42 percent of some 2,000 respondents said they were struggling financially, up from 29 percent in 2019. I see the same feelings and preoccupations when I talk to my own friends: crumbling infrastructure, unaffordable health care, wealth disparities so deep that even people with jobs end up sleeping in their cars. All of this is paired with a shifting image of China among young Americans, who are about half as likely as their parents, and around one-fifth as likely as their grandparents, to see China as an “enemy” of the United States.

这些视频可能会受到一些美国年轻人欢迎，这并不令人意外。今年的哈佛大学春季青年民意调查显示，约2000名受访者中，有42%的人表示他们面临经济困难，高于2019年的29%。我在与朋友谈话时也听到了同样的感受和担忧：美国的基础设施正在崩溃，医疗费用高到负担不起，贫富差距如此巨大，就连有工作的人也会落入睡在车里的境地。伴随所有这一切的是美国年轻人对中国看法的改变。他们把中国视为美国的“敌人”的可能性大约是他们父母辈的一半，大约是他们祖父母辈的20%。

You could sense this in March, when the American YouTuber Darren Jason Watkins Jr. (a.k.a. IShowSpeed) began traveling through China, livestreaming lengthy videos — the Beijing entry stretches to six hours — that have been viewed tens of millions of times. Both Watkins and a share of his audience were clearly excited by what they saw. On his visit to Shenzhen, he rode in an amphibious car made by the Chinese manufacturer BYD, amazing viewers with the sight of a street-legal S.U.V. wading easily into a body of water. “China is legit the future,” one commenter wrote.

今年3月，这种变化可见一斑，YouTube上的美国网红小达伦·杰森·沃特金斯（网名IShowSpeed）开始了他中国旅行的长视频直播——北京的那段长达六小时——观看次数超过几千万。沃特金斯和他的部分观众显然对他们看到的东西感到兴奋。他在深圳旅行时乘坐了一辆由中国制造商比亚迪制造的水陆两用车，这辆符合上路法规的SUV轻松开进一片水里的画面令观众惊叹不已。“中国的确是未来，”一名评论者写道。

Watkins has close to 40 million subscribers on YouTube, many of whom must still be in their teens, living in an American car market where what passes for innovation is a modular tailgate. (BYD and other Chinese auto companies are effectively banned from the American market by protectionist policies that long predate Trump’s.) In those streams, they may well have found a more optimistic, imaginative view of the future than their own country has lately conjured — the China that has built thousands of miles of high-speed rail while California struggles to lay down short stretches, or made its wind- and solar-power generation eclipse its fossil-fuel power capacity while Trump cancels federal grants for renewable energy.

沃特金斯在YouTube上有近4000万订阅者，其中许多人肯定还是只有十几岁的青少年，在他们在生活中看到的美国汽车市场，所谓创新只不过是多功能的卡车箱后挡板。（美国的贸易保护政策在特朗普上台前就已基本上禁止了比亚迪和其他中国汽车公司进入美国市场。）在TikTok上的这些直播中，美国年轻人也许看到了另一种未来，比他们自己国家这些日子里能让人想象出来的更乐观：中国修建了几万公里的高速铁路，而加州建设短距离高铁仍困难重重；中国的风能和太阳能发电量已超过了化石燃料发电量，而特朗普却在取消联邦政府对可再生能源的拨款。

This intoxicating portrait is, of course, an exercise in image-building on the part of China. Watkins’s streams can be entertaining, but they certainly aren’t an objective exploration of Chinese life; they are a kind of glossy tourist video, made with the apparent blessing of a Chinese government that wouldn’t have given him latitude to document, say, the blanket surveillance, political repression or forced labor that make it possible for the nation to complete those ambitious infrastructure projects. (Or the massive “ghost cities” and excess rail lines that sit unused.) In that sense, the streams are not so different from the videos in which telegenic young people crow about their factories’ making garments for Lululemon or Lacoste, as if they might sell you those items without the retail markup. What we are seeing online tends to be China’s very best face.

这个令人神往的画面当然是中国打造自身形象的一个组成部分。虽然沃特金斯的直播能娱乐观众，但它们当然不是对中国人生活的客观探索；它们更像是光鲜亮丽的旅游宣传视频，似乎得到了中国政府的默许。中国政府不会允许他记录无所不在的监控、政治迫害，或强迫劳动，那些东西让中国得以修建雄心勃勃的基础设施项目。（还有大量“鬼城”和闲置过剩的铁路）。在这个意义上，这些直播与那些上镜的中国年轻人制作的视频没有太大区别，他们号称自己的工厂为露露乐蒙或Lacoste生产服装，好像他们能够不经零售商加价就把这些产品直接卖给你。我们在网上看到的往往是中国最好的一面。

Still, the accelerating flow of video between the two countries might be rewiring our relationship. Something like an anonymous TikTok account posting unflattering comparisons between New York and China’s subway systems — the former rat-infested and leaky, the latter immaculate and full of polished stone — feels like a new evolution in that exchange, not least because Americans seem increasingly willing to admit to its veracity. Those manufacturers’ videos fall into a wave of soft, small-scale influence-peddling. Somewhere beneath the negotiations of two nations, another begins between individuals, one of whom really wants new leggings at a steep discount, another of whom needs to sell exactly that.

尽管如此，两国之间交流的视频量日益增长，这也许正在重塑我们的关系。比如，一个匿名账号在TikTok上发布对比视频，比较纽约和中国的地铁系统——前者受鼠患危害还漏水，后者一尘不染，到处是抛光的大理石。这种不太客气的比较似乎是这种交流的新发展，尤其因为美国人似乎越来越愿意承认其真实性。那些制造商的视频属于一波软推销类的小规模影响力渗透。在高层的两国谈判之下，个体之间的另一种谈判已经开始，一方是渴望以极低价格购买新紧身裤的人，另一方是需要将这种东西卖出去的人。

Recently, I asked a couple of friends — both are in their late 30s, and have lived in China their entire lives — how their own views of America have shifted over time. Both said that they ravenously consumed American culture, and saw the United States as a nation of cohesive, dynamic people. But over the last 10 years, their sense was that America was degrading, its democracy growing more brittle; they saw our gun violence, political clashes and treatment of immigrants as signs of a country whose flaws were becoming mortal wounds.

最近，我问两名一直在中国生活、快40岁的朋友，随着时间的推移，他们对美国的看法发生了什么变化。他们说，他们都曾是美国文化如饥似渴的消费者，认为美国是一个有凝聚力、充满活力的国家。但过去10年来，他们的感觉是美国正在衰落，美国的民主制度正在变得越来越脆弱；他们将我们的枪支暴力、政治冲突，以及对待移民的做法视为这个国家的缺点正在变成致命伤的迹象。

Yet seeing the wrinkles and scars of a country they had admired also humanized it. Anti-Americanism, one told me, was not a default perspective among his peers, and most of his younger colleagues drew clear distinctions between the American people and the American government. When TikTok was briefly banned, he said, many Americans started joining the Chinese platform RedNote, creating a moment when people in the two countries were speaking to one another through social media. “From the posts of countless ordinary Americans, we know that the United States is neither heaven nor hell,” he told me; American life was “a mixture of happiness, pain, trouble and curiosity, just like my own life.” Grand projects of geopolitical maneuvering will continue between the two nations. But there is also a growing dialogue between the peoples themselves, and the possibility that it could shape public opinion as much as anything happening in Beijing or Washington.

不过，看到这些皱纹和伤疤，也让他们曾经钦佩的国家显得更有人情味。其中一人告诉我，反美主义在他的同龄人中并非默认观点，他的大多数年轻同事将美国人民和美国政府明确区分开来。他说，TikTok被短暂封禁期间，许多美国人开始加入中国平台小红书，创造了一个两国人民在社交媒体上直接交流的时刻。“我们从无数普通美国人的帖子里了解到，美国既不是天堂，也不是地狱，”他告诉我；美国人的生活“与我自己的生活一样，交织着快乐、痛苦、烦恼和好奇。”两国之间的地缘政治宏大博弈还将继续下去。但两国人民之间的对话也在不断增多，而这种交流有可能对公众舆论的影响，丝毫不亚于北京或华盛顿正在发生的任何事情。