Reading through it, I see that China is making three points, without saying so.
Phase One Economic and Trade Agreement if terminated would lead to a lot of bad things for the U.S.
Gains from economic and trade relations between China and the US are generally balanced. In other words, this trade war will hurt the U.S. a lot more than the surface trade imbalance would suggest.
The US Side Has Failed to Meet Its Obligations Under the Phase One Economic and Trade Agreement - This is not so much a dig at the U.S. but a sales pitch to all of China’s trading partners that China’s word matters and the U.S. s word is worthless.
I suggest that anyone truly interested in how this trade war might turn out should at least skim through this paper.
I don’t have patience to read the whole thing but the paragraph titles were very helpful. In summary, it’s all Amerca’s fault and China is blameless. In my opinion neither is blameless as each pursues its own national interests which clearly creates conflicts that both tend to ignore. Then somebody wants a better deal…
Most countries know they are no match for the USA. China thinks it is.
As the world’s largest developing country, China is also the largest contributor to annual global economic growth. As the largest developed country, the United States boasts the largest economy in the world.
About half way through I started skimming through it too.
What I took away was the China thinks it can go toe to tow in a tariff war. From China’s point if view, the U.S. has dollar for dollar the same amount of trade at risk as China does.
It can quit doing things like protecting intellectual property rights and can stop policing drugs including fentanyl
Finally, China laid out a case that China not the U.S. is the trust worthy trading partner.
While this paper was not a war plan, it would not take genius to build one off of it.
The last thing that I took away from the paper was this: It could have been written by a college intern, it was not that complex nor did it have any insights that a person with access to high ranking officials would have. On the other hand, it was dramatically more well thought out than anything, this includes the press, the democrats, the republicans, and the White House has put out.
At the turn of the century, there were high hopes that China’s WTO accession would mark the dawn of a new era for global trade. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton even boasted that by joining the WTO, China was “agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom.”
China’s problem is that it is too good in manufacturing while rest of the world sucks. China’s trade surplus are very high. This is not sustainable.
China needs to import more from the US and rest of the world and not run huge surplus. This way, everyone will be happy.
Hope this standoff works out for everyone and the trade does from $500B to $2T in coming years.
Thing is, if you make high quality products, at attractive prices, the only things you would import would be raw materials, food, and fuel. Your exports, by their nature, are much more valuable than your imports. Seems a trade surplus would be inevitable.
There are some, probably propagandist, that say it has already declined, and that the census numbers from the last 25 years have been overstated due to incentives to local officials to overstate them. Something about getting central government money for bodies.
On the other hand, who is building all that stuff?
That would imply that China only has slightly more “customers” than the US. So the USian “JCs” have less interest in selling them rope? So, that makes China expendable as a customer? So, bring on the trade war?
