Let that kind of trade continue unmolested and work instead on protecting our advantages in quantum computing, artificial intelligence, autonomous drones, and so on. Importing t-shirts and sneakers from China doesn’t threaten our national security.
We should not be using the blunt tool of tariffs to fight a trade deficit that is actually necessary. The Chinese are not paying our tariffs US consumers are. They are blunt instruments that may feel good to swing, but they hurt the wrong people and may not accomplish what we want. Broad-based tariffs are the opposite of what we should be doing. This means our response has to be narrowly targeted at specific companies and products. Much of our “peaceful” technology is easily weaponized. Nowadays, military superiority is less about factories and shipyards than high-tech weapons and cyberwarfare.
However, free trade doesn’t mean nations need to arm their potential adversaries.
I think David Ricardo was right about comparative advantage: Every nation is better off if all specialize in whatever they do best. That’s not entirely wrong, but it’s also not the main challenge. We hear a lot about China cheating on trade deals and taking jobs from Americans. In crafting a response, the first step is to define the problem correctly and specifically. In any case, we have reached a crossroads. They see his talk of restoring America’s greatness as an affront to their own dreams. Pillsbury (who, by the way, advises the White House including the president himself) thinks the clash is intensifying because President Trump’s China skepticism is disrupting the Chinese plan. Sometimes this happened voluntarily, as companies gave away trade secrets in the (often futile) hope it would let them access China’s huge market. Other times it was outright theft. In either case, this was no accident but part of a long-term plan. Hundreds of billions of Western dollars have been spent developing China and its state-owned businesses. Over the last 20–30 years, we have equipped the Chinese with almost everything they need to match us, technologically and otherwise. In fact, the intent was to acquire our capital, technology, and other resources for use in China’s own modernization. To that end, according to Pillsbury, the Chinese manipulated Western politicians and business leaders into thinking China was evolving toward democracy and capitalism. Pillsbury says Xi Jinping really sees this as China’s destiny, and himself as the leader who will deliver it.
It isn’t always clear to Western minds whether they actually believe the rhetoric or simply use it to keep the peasantry in line. For the Chinese, this blends with the country’s own long history. Grand dreams of world domination are part and parcel of communist ideologies, going all the way back to Karl Marx. These are not merely words for the consumption of the masses. Xi’s vision of the Chinese Communist Party controlling the state and eventually influencing and even controlling the rest of the world is clear. Unfortunately, the hawks are ascendant, embodied most clearly in Xi Jinping.
The strategy has been well documented in Chinese literature, published and sanctioned by organizations of the People’s Liberation Army, for well over 50 years.Īnd just as we have hawks and moderates on China within the US, there are hawks and moderates within China about how to engage the West. They want to do this by 2049, the centennial of China’s Communist revolution. In The Hundred-Year Marathon, Michael Pillsbury marshals a lot of evidence showing the Chinese government has a detailed strategy to overtake the US as the world’s dominant power. So here we are, our economy now hardwired with an autocratic regime that has no interest in becoming like us. Xi calls it “Socialism with a Chinese character.” It appears to be a dynamic capitalistic market, but is also a totalitarian, top-down structure with rigid rules and social restrictions. Today’s Chinese communists are nowhere near Mao’s kind of communism. We perceived a bigger change than there actually was. Leaders in Beijing may have admired our accomplishments, but not enough to abandon Communism. Obviously, our ways were best.īut that wasn’t obvious to people elsewhere, most notably China. Our ideas, freedom, and technology had won both World War II and the Cold War that followed it. We in the Western world thought (somewhat arrogantly, in hindsight) everyone else wanted to be like us. Thus came the incredible extension of globalization. American businesses shifted production to lower-cost countries. The US, as sole superpower, saw opportunities everywhere. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union collapsed and the internet was born.