Pro-con: Is Trump right on China?
President-elect Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Taiwan early this month shattered the tired political wisdom of the Washington establishment regarding China and the island the mainland considers a breakaway province.
It sent a powerful message to Beijing that major change is coming in America’s foreign policy.
The facts surrounding America’s relationship with China show it’s been a one-way arrangement for many years, particularly for the past eight. It is time for America to respond more firmly to China’s aggressive and unproductive behavior.
The evidence is beyond dispute. China has proven time and again that it is an untrustworthy partner for the United States.
Despite acquiring permanent, normal trade relation status, China continues currency manipulation and other unacceptable behaviors. Just recently, the U.S. criticized China for its lack of transparency and charged it with violating tariff quota agreements on corn, wheat and rice.
Further, Chinese state-sponsored and state-owned companies have maintained aggressive cyberattacks against the United States.
Millions of Americans’ most personal and sensitive financial information are now in the hands of the Chinese.
That’s not to mention that economic espionage, including the attempted stealing of trade secrets of U.S. companies, persists. China does not suitably protect intellectual property. Who knows how they'll use that sensitive information in the future.
Americans who have had their personal data stolen by the Chinese or have lost their jobs to unfair competition from the Chinese are thankful for Trump’s strong approach.
He is leading America to take the initiative to develop strategic policies that will address China’s inappropriate behavior and hold its leaders accountable.
Pete Hoekstra, former chairman of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee
Bullying may have helped Donald Trump in his real estate career but it is not going to move China.
Trump’s ostensible reason for the hard line against China is that he wants to negotiate a better deal for U.S. manufacturing, including for workers stateside.
The big complaint here is that China has manipulated its currency, keeping it undervalued against the U.S. dollar. This would make U.S. imports from China artificially cheap and our exports more expensive.
But there is an easy way to deal with this. As any economist knows, our Treasury Department and Federal Reserve can control the value of the dollar against foreign currencies.
The reason that our government doesn’t intervene to push down the value of the dollar is that powerful U.S. transnational corporations, such as Wal-Mart, prefer a strong dollar because it makes imports and overseas labor cheaper for them. The financial sector also prefers it because it lowers inflation. These people don’t care about manufacturing jobs in America.
When our government has negotiated with China over economic issues, it has fought for things that profit U.S. corporations, such as more patent and copyright protection and greater access for our financial corporations.
Ironically, China has actually been intervening to keep its own currency from falling and has burned through about a quarter of its international reserves since June 2015 in the process.
We will soon see if our new presidential administration actually wants to do anything to preserve American manufacturing jobs.
In the meantime, picking a fight with China over Taiwan is about the worst way a new presidency could start out, short of actual warfare.
Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research
This story was originally published December 25, 2016 at 5:03 AM with the headline "Pro-con: Is Trump right on China?."