China Really Does Control The Fate Of The United States

China Really Does Control The Fate Of The United States

SwabiDabi

October 10, 2021

In regards to auto glass in Richmond, Virginia foreign parts are unavailable and at high demand. The relationship with China and the Trump administration is differently showing his ass now. All those tariffs along with restrictions put into play has effected shipping and increased cost by 40%

 Despite Trump’s claim that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” the ultimate results of the phase one trade deal between China and the United States — and the trade war that preceded it — have significantly hurt the American economy without solving the underlying economic concerns that the trade war was meant to resolve. The effects of the trade war go beyond economics, though. Trump’s prioritization on the trade deal and de-prioritization of all other dimensions of the relationship produced a more permissive environment for China to advance its interests abroad and oppress its own people at home, secure in the knowledge that American responses would be muted by a president who was reluctant to risk losing the deal.

More than seven months into the Biden administration, American businesses say they are growing increasingly frustrated by the White House’s approach to China, with confrontational policies imposed during the Trump era still in place and President Biden offering little clarity about economic engagement with the world’s second-largest economy.

The relationship between the two economic superpowers remains deeply fractured. American import duties still exist on roughly $360 billion worth of Chinese goods, and almost all of the exemptions that shielded more than 2,000 products from those tariffs have expired. A thicket of export controls and bans are still in place, leaving U.S. technology giants such as Qualcomm, Intel and Google in the lurch over how to approach the Chinese market and offering little hope that the decoupling of the world’s two largest economies will be reversed anytime soon.

To the dismay of some American business leaders, Mr. Biden has amplified some of the Trump administration’s punitive moves. In July, the Biden administration expanded the list of Chinese officials under sanctions by the United States for their role in undermining Hong Kong’s democratic institutions. In June, the president issued an executive order adding more Chinese companies to a prohibition on American investments in Chinese firms that have links to the country’s military or that sell surveillance technology used to repress dissent or religious minorities.

Yet Mr. Biden and his top advisers have yet to elucidate how they view economic relations with Beijing, saying they will make the administration’s approach known once a broad review of China trade policy concludes. But the review has stretched on for months with no public timeline for its conclusion.

President Trump launched the trade war to pressure Beijing to implement significant changes to aspects of its economic system that facilitate unfair Chinese trade practices, including forced technology transfer, limited market access, intellectual property theft, and subsidies to state-owned enterprises. Trump argued that unilateral tariffs would shrink the U.S. trade deficit with China and cause companies to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Between July 2018 and August 2019, the United States announced plans to impose tariffs on more than $550 billion of Chinese products, and China retaliated with tariffs on more than $185 billion of U.S. goods.

The trade war caused economic pain and led to diversion of trade flows away from the United States. As described by Heather Long at the Washington Post, “U.S. economic growth slowed, business investment froze, and companies didn’t hire as many people. Across the nation, a lot of farmers went bankrupt, and the manufacturing and freight transportation sectors have hit lows not seen since the last recession. Trump’s actions amounted to one of the largest tax increases in years.”

Numerous studies have found that U.S. companies primarily paid for U.S. tariffs, with the cost estimated at nearly $46 billion. The tariffs forced American companies to accept lower profit margins, cut wages and jobs for U.S. workers, defer potential wage hikes or expansions, and raise prices for American consumers or companies. A spokesperson for the American Farm Bureau stated that “farmers have lost the vast majority of what was once a $24 billion market in China” as a result of Chinese retaliatory actions.

However, trade deficits are not a good indicator of the state of the economy, and U.S. trade balances largely are driven by soaring U.S. federal budget deficits, which have little to do with China. The irony is that three years after Trump’s tariffs were initiated to fix the U.S. trade deficit, bilateral trade between the United States and China has now rebounded to all-time highs, China. 

Trump’s unilateral tariffs on China diverted trade flows from China, causing the U.S. trade deficit with Europe, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to increase as a result.a’s trade surplus has increased, and the U.S. deficit has gotten worse.

The reality is that it takes generations to develop a sound regime for intellectual property rights, as was the case for the United States. The foundation of China’s system was laid only two decades ago with reforms that accompanied China’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization.