China’s Competitiveness and American Badmouthing
The latest campaign of the United States against China is the charge that China has excess capacity in a range of manufactured goods and so should restrain its exports. The truth is simpler. China and other countries of East Asia are the world’s low-cost producers of a range of products that the world urgently needs: solar modules, electric vehicles, wind turbines, efficient batteries, 5G and more. Since the US lags behind China in these sectors, the US is bad-mouthing China, alleging that China’s success is bad behavior.
The US approach to China is based on a mix of arrogance, nastiness, and naivete. The arrogance is that the US runs the world, so how dare China have such economic success! The nastiness is that the US is actively out to hinder China’s progress.
The arrogance was spelled out in 2015 by Ambassador Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis in a publication for the Council on Foreign Relations. In March 2015, they wrote: “Since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals, first on the North American continent, then in the Western hemisphere, and finally globally...”
“Because the American effort to "integrate" China into the liberal international order has now generated new threats to U.S. primacy in Asia -- and could eventually result in a consequential challenge to American power globally -- Washington needs a new grand strategy toward China that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power rather than continuing to assist its ascendancy.”
It's a vain and ultimately doomed objective. After all, the US has 335 million people while China has 1.4 billion people, or roughly four times more. How is the US to remain dominant when China is four times more populous? The American answer implicitly is to keep China in relative poverty, with a GDP no more than one-fourth of the US level. But rest assured that China will not be hegemon either. China’s share of world output will peak at around 20 percent, and China will face significant challenges of a declining and aging population during the 21st century.
The nasty part of the US’s strategy follows its misguided attempt to be global hegemon. The US goal is to slow, if not derail, China’s economic success. Blackwill and Tellis spelled out the game plan: trying to cut China out of trade agreements; trying to cut China out from high-tech goods such as advanced semiconductors; surrounding China militarily on the Asian rimlands; and forging new military alliances in Asia.
President Barack Obama started the process by trying (and failing) to create a trade agreement with Asian countries that excluded China. Trump hit China over the head with a spate of unilateral tariff increases that plainly and brazenly violated the WTO. Biden not only kept Trump’s tariffs, but doubled down on them, introducing new layers of protectionism and technology export bans.
China’s exports to the US markets not only stopped growing, but actually went into decline. Measured as a share of US GDP, US imports from China fell from 2.6% of GDP in 2018 to 1.6% of GDP in 2023.
We recently also learned something quite astounding, when Reuters revealed that Trump had tasked the CIA with spreading malicious gossip about China in the social media, including badmouthing of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Here’s a better and more honest approach. The US should acknowledge that it fell far behind China (including Taiwan), Korea, and Japan, in many areas of advanced manufacturing not because of nefariousness of those East Asian countries but because the US lost its way when it came to fostering green and 5G technologies.
Second, the US should cooperate with China, not fight with it, when it comes to global sustainable development. Rather than badmouthing the BRI, as the CIA did in its propaganda, the USG should be partnering with China, Korea, Japan, and others in a cooperative policy to promote more investments in green and digital technologies in the emerging economies around the world. That’s the kind of win-win policy that should replace America’s destructive -- and self-destructive – machinations for hegemony.
https://nation.africa/kenya/blogs-opinion/blogs/sachs-us-badmouthing-of-more-competitive-china-imprudent-4593168