August 14, 2018

These days in U.S.-China trade relations, confrontation is the governing principle. In an effort to challenge China’s growing global economic clout, Donald Trump’s administration has, to date, levied around $37 billion in tariffs on Chinese products and threatened to expand these measures to cover all $504 billion in U.S. imports from China. While the measures may help reduce the trade deficit between the countries and provide temporary comfort to U.S. workers, they offer little in the way of creating a more equitable and sustainable trading relationship.

Confrontation hasn’t always been the go-to option for the United States and China, though. While the election of Trump played a key role in shaping the current conflict, his rise is only a bookend in a story that really began back in 2001, with the decision to bring China into the World Trade Organization (WTO). In joining the WTO, China committed to lowering its trade barriers and following a standard set of international-trade practices required by the club of trading nations, including agreeing not to subject foreign goods to costly regulations or taxes. In 2001, President Bill Clinton remarked that, in economic terms, the U.S. decision to accept China’s entry into the WTO, by extending it preferential treatment, was the equivalent of a “one-way street,” with American workers, consumers, and investors being the biggest beneficiaries.

Yet things didn’t go entirely as planned. During China’s first decade in the WTO, its exports to the United States greatly outpaced its imports from the United States, ballooning the bilateral deficit. The unbridled access to Chinese markets promised to U.S. companies never materialized, nor did a surplus of high-paying jobs suddenly appear across America. For many in the Trump administration, especially people like the economic advisor Peter Navarro and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, the decision to bring China into the WTO sold average Americans out to U.S. political and business elites.

Read more:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/china-trump-trade-united-states/567526/