On the third day of the Lunar New Year, while Chinese communities worldwide were still in a festive mood, the US International Trade Commission ruled that anti-dumping duties of 32.12 percent to 52.51 percent would be levied on large washing machines imported from China.
This is the fourth time this year that the US has imposed anti-dumping or anti-subsidy sanctions on Chinese imports. This once again casts a shadow over the uncertainty of economic relations between China and the US following US President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
This is not a new issue, nor is the scale and trade amount of the involved industries very large.
China’s Trade Remedy and Investigation Bureau responded with its usual rhetoric, calling the ruling “seriously questionable.”
However, all three trade officials nominated by Trump are hardliners. In congressional hearings, US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross accused China of being the most protectionist nation in the world.
White House National Trade Council Director Peter Navarro has published three books criticizing China for engaging in unfair trading practices, and US Trade Representative nominee Robert Lighthizer has made similar criticisms. Does this mean that friction between the US and China will become more intense?
There are reasons to be more optimistic. Pure trade protectionism or isolationism is detrimental to the US, which is something Trump, as a businessman, must be well aware of. He wants to withdraw from multilateral trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and replace them with renegotiated bilateral trade agreements in the belief that it will help the “no longer so great” US to reach better trade terms. This view is not necessarily wrong.
Over the past two decades of globalization, capital has been moving unregulated from place to place.
The beneficiaries have been large European and US enterprises and the middle classes of emerging nations, while the middle classes of developed countries, especially the US, have remained in the doldrums. Big US companies are making record profits just as the stock market is reaching record highs, while many in the middle class have lost good jobs and joined the ranks of those in the lowest-paid service sector. In Trump’s eyes, this free trade at the expense of the public must be replaced by bilateral “fair” trade.
Trump can ignore the stars in Hollywood and on Broadway, the opponents in the US Democratic Party and even dissent in the US Republican Party, but as a political novice, his power comes from grassroots supporters and a frustrated middle class and he must therefore strive for better terms of trade for their sake.
Perhaps economic and trade data are too trivial, but Trump voters, who self-deprecatingly call themselves “pathetic” and ridicule failed Democratic US presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, are indeed supported by statistics: The latest data show that average life expectancy in the US has decreased. In the US — a biotechnology leader with advanced medical technology, at an ordinary time without epidemics or natural disasters — American lives are being cut short.
As the world’s first and second-largest economies, there are lots of possibilities of exchange between the US and China in areas such as agriculture, education, healthcare, aviation and infrastructure construction. Trump should understand that to improve the situation promoting mutually beneficial fair trade with China is more valuable than uncontrolled, runaway free trade. Let us wait for the confrontation and negotiations between the two.
Jason Yeh is an associate professor of finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past
President-elect William Lai (賴清德) is to accede to the presidency this month at a time when the international order is in its greatest flux in three decades. Lai must navigate the ship of state through the choppy waters of an assertive China that is refusing to play by the rules, challenging the territorial claims of multiple nations and increasing its pressure on Taiwan. It is widely held in democratic capitals that Taiwan is important to the maintenance and survival of the liberal international order. Taiwan is strategically located, hemming China’s People’s Liberation Army inside the first island chain, preventing it from