President Donald J. Trump joins Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, at the start of their bilateral meeting Saturday, June 29, 2019, at the G20 Japan Summit in Osaka, Japan. ( Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
In The Hill, Bradley A. Thayer and Lianchao Han explain that China must be confronted or it will continue to erode America’s free-market economy. In the short-term America must suffer some pain in order to win back the jobs China has stolen with unfair trade practices, intellectual property theft, closed markets, and subsidized socialist businesses. Only Donald Trump has had the courage to confront China’s freedom-threatening manipulation of trade. Thayer and Han explain:
In 1987, China’s trade surplus with the U.S. was only $2.7 billion, one-twentieth of Japan’s.
By 2018, the People’s Republic of China’s trade surplus with the U.S. had reached nearly $418 billion, 150 times what it was three decades ago.
In the past 30 years, China has snatched an astronomical $4.4 trillion from the U.S. Additionally, there is an estimated $300 billion to $600 billion annual loss from China’s theft, and at least 3 million highly paid U.S manufacturing workers lost their jobs because of competition from China.
Chinese government-subsidized or forced labor produced billions of dollars worth of cheap goods that have been dumped onto the U.S. market.
U..S. options are straightforward: Endure short-term pain, or let the Chinese cancer to erode its free-market economy.
The U.S. must confront China’s unfair trade practices, its socialist economic structure, its intellectual property theft, its closed internet markets and other non-trade barriers.
Read more here.
