Tariffs: How Did We Get Here?

By James StuberAuthor & Founder MadeInAmericaAgain.org-Contributor The American Dossier How did it come to this? The breakdown of trade talks and imposition of new tariffs on Chinese goods has refocused attention on the U.S.-China economic relationship. In a previous column I recounted the lost jobs and social damage resulting from that one-sided relationship in which the Chinese annually sell some $420 billion more products to the U.S. than they buy. It wasnt supposed to work out this way. China was supposed to play fair under the international trading system and over time become a market-based free economy. The opposite has happened: state-owned enterprises state subsidies to private" enterprises state-sponsored technology theft and protectionism still hold sway and Chinese and even Western joint venture companies are being required to place Chinese Communist Party officials on their boards. And China was supposed to become more democratic as its middle class grew. Instead the Chinese Communist Party has become more entrenched and Xi Jinping has consolidated power not seen since Mao Zedong. Why did those rosy predictions fail? We must recognize that our economic relationship with China is part of something much bigger: China endured the Great Humiliation" at the hands of the Western powers and Japan for a century from the 1840s through World War II. To appreciate its indelible mark on the Chinese psyche imagine the Chinese taking over the U.S. port cities of New York Charleston Houston and Los Angeles and Chinese gunships plying the Mississippi river. Now China has embarked on what its leader Xi Jinping calls the Great Rejuvenation" aimed at achieving Chinese global economic technological and military preeminence as spelled out in the China 2025" and China 2049" plans. In pursuit of those goals China is practicing -- Economic imperialism through Chinas Belt and Road" initiative in which it lends money to countries to build infrastructure to carry Chinese products to the rest of the word; outright purchase of Western companies; and perhaps most insidiously as my colleague Roger Robinson has pointed out selling stock in Chinese companies in the U.S. over-the-counter stock markets co-opting U.S. shareholders into supporting Chinese economic goals; Cultural Imperialism by establishing and funding Chinese institutes" at Western universities and placing propaganda ads in the Wall Street Journal that read like news stories; Military Imperialism through an enormous buildup of naval air and land forces and laying claim to the entire South China Sea with the support of militarized man-made islands. So we must ask what does it look like when China is in charge of the world? We receive more than a hint by looking inside China where a million Uighurs of the Xinjiang region have been placed in indoctrination camps and Maos Little Red Book has been replaced by a phone app that keeps track of how often people are reading Xi Jinpings words. In short we can look forward to technology-enabled totalitarianism with one goal keeping the Chinese Communist Party in Power. Its time to step off the road to that future; tariffs are a first step. Jim has founded a non-profit organization called Made in America Again. Their mission is to create awareness and build healthy American communities through consumers buying things made in those communities. His specific goal for MIAA is to bring home $500 billion in consumer spending enough to balance trade create six million jobs take the slack out of the economy and get a virtuous circle going again. Jim has kindly agreed to share his insights from time to time. For more information on Stubers research visit www.madeinamericaagain.org