In his latest iteration of “The Art of the Deal,” President Donald Trump is finally giving China its due after more than two decades of lying, stealing, and wildly nefarious trade practices.
"I served in the Clinton White House. The Clinton administration made a grave strategic error by letting China into the WTO without sufficient conditionality," former Clinton official Jamie Metzel admitted this week.
After the United States admitted China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 the communist state, with ambitions of global domination, has been given special rules, treatment, and a tolerance for scamming. Chinese companies are allowed to operate inside the United States and all over the world with little scrutiny — even buying up American farmland next to sensitive military sites — while reciprocity for U.S. companies isn’t an option in China.
Making matters worse, once China lets U.S. companies into the country with a laundry list of conditions, the government steals intellectual property, replicates it, and then uses it to put the U.S. out of business.
“Chinese policy is to extract technologies from Western companies, use subsidies and nontariff barriers to competition to build national champions, and then create a protected domestic market for these champions to give them an advantage as they compete globally,” Tech Diplomacy reports. “After acquiring intellectual property, Chinese government subsidies and regulations help Chinese companies secure market shares in the global markets at the expense of the US. A congressional estimate in the US placed the cost of Chinese intellectual property theft at 225–600 billion dollars yearly. According to a CNBC survey, 1 in 5 corporations say China has stolen intellectual property within the previous year, while 1 in 3 said it had happened some times during the previous century.”
With the latest tariff war, reputations and track records are going to matter. A lot.
One swing through Africa and you’ll find the so-called “goodwill” of China and its Belt-and-Road initiative, in addition to infrastructure projects, have been a total disaster.
“Dipak Patel can still recall the dizzying grandeur of his 2003 visit to Beijing’s cavernous Great Hall of the People: the rows of stern guards all the same height, the state dinner that included stewed shark fin and bird’s nest soup, and the People’s Liberation Army band playing songs from Patel’s native Zambia—even singing in one of the African country’s scores of dialects,” Bloomberg reported in 2020. “While most delegates were eager to accept anything they could get for projects such as a hydropower dam and a 50,000-seat soccer stadium, Patel urged caution.”
“His warning went unheeded, and Zambia started to take out loans from Chinese banks for airports, hospitals, housing projects, and the roads connecting them. Chinese credit has grown to about a third of Zambia’s external debt, which has surged sevenfold over the past decade, forcing the government this year to ask creditors to reschedule loans,” the report continues. “Nigerian lawmakers are reviewing Chinese loans they say were unfavorable. Activists in Kenya are demanding the government disclose the terms of Chinese credit used to build a 470-kilometer (292-mile) railway. And Tanzanian President John Magufuli calls an agreement his predecessor made with Chinese investors, to build a $10 billion port and economic zone, a deal ‘only a madman would sign.’”
Not only were the so-called loans an unforgivable trap, the infrastructure was built with Chinese labor, not locals, and it’s falling apart -- just like the cheap Chinese goods sold at Walmart.
Now that his second term is underway, Trump is saying: enough. He’s slapping reciprocal tariffs on China. As he negotiates with 75 countries on new trade policies, China’s lack of credibility will push those countries towards to U.S. — further isolating the CCP.
“Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately. At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries, is no longer sustainable or acceptable,” Trump announced this week. “Conversely, and based on the fact that more than 75 Countries have called Representatives of the United States, including the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and the USTR, to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to Trade, Trade Barriers, Tariffs, Currency Manipulation, and Non Monetary Tariffs, and that these Countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the United States, I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately.”
The choice is clear and everyone knows it. The jig is up for China. The products they're selling are a scam.