- Jul 2, 2003
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In January, President Donald Trump declared trade war on China. It gives me no pleasure to report that China — a ruthless anti-American dictatorship — is winning. But the evidence is inescapable.
You can see it in the economic numbers: China’s economy grew by an average of 5.3 percent in the first half of the year, America’s by only 1.25 percent. You can see it, too, in Trump’s failure to wring significant concessions from Beijing. While most countries have acquiesced to U.S. trade bullying, China has not. In April, Trump hiked U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods to 145 percent. China retaliated with 125 percent tariffs on U.S. goods. Then President Xi Jinping ramped up the pressure by restricting exports of rare earth metals to the United States, threatening to halt production of everything from cars to fighter jets.
Trump had to back down, agreeing to cut U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods to 30 percent, while Chinese tariffs on U.S. goods were reduced to 10 percent. Tariffs remain frozen at those levels despite several rounds of Washington-Beijing talks. Trump tried to market this agreement as a “historic trade win,” but it was simply a truce. It did nothing to address long-standing U.S. complaints about China’s dumping of products on the world market, theft of intellectual property and other offenses.
There are other ways Trump is inadvertently helping China included in the article. Trump’s attempts to close down Voice of America are another gift to Beijing. From Indonesia to Nigeria, Chinese state media is filling the vacuum left behind by VOA. Trump’s decision to walk away from the World Health Organization and UNESCO has also opened the door for China to increase its influence in those international organizations.....
China already leads the United States in most frontier technologies, including batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles, drones, advanced optical communication systems, machine learning and high-performance computing. Trump’s tariffs will do nothing to reverse these trends, while his cutbacks to R&D spending and restrictions on foreign students will only accelerate them.
Trump's other trade agreements with our Pacific allies only gets vague promises of investing in the US, but no firm commitments from business come with that. China is gaining in trade and influence. The US has worked for decades to draw India in the US sphere of influence, but now China is gaining in India.
US allies felt that Trump's manner of handling the trade deals was humiliating. That is going to have a negative effect.
