By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, May 31,
2024
In Hong Kong, the local factota operating in the
interests of Beijing have convicted 14 democracy
activists of subversion for the crime—and it is, under local law, a
crime—of working to organize a slate of candidates for office who would work
for liberty and democracy in Hong Kong. In a moment of perhaps unintentional
candor, the junta pretending to be a court of law found that electing such
candidates would provoke “a constitutional crisis for Hong Kong,” which is, of
course, entirely true, though perhaps not in the way the authorities meant
it.
This is one of those periodic reminders that Washington
cannot articulate a coherent China policy because Washington cannot figure out
what kind of relationship the United States should have with the so-called
People’s Republic of China. Answering that question is probably going to be the
most important foreign policy issue of the next half-century or more.
Unhappily, the two main competing currents of thought on U.S.-China relations
are represented at the moment by Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which means that
they are barely competing currents at all but instead are two very closely
related variations on the theme of short-term parochial economic nationalism.
Biden wants a 100 percent tariff on Chinese-made electric cars; Trump, in …
contrast? … prefers a 100-percent tariff on Chinese-made electric cars,
other Chinese-made vehicles, and
pretty much everything else made in China.
Washington talks as though the United States were on the
verge of war with China. Our top foreign policy thinkers have been describing
China as a U.S. enemy—as the main U.S. enemy—for a quarter-century.
Some 40 percent of Americans describe China as an “enemy.” Beijing, for its
part, makes practically no effort to disguise its belligerent attitude toward
the United States. And, yet, relations between the two countries are, at the
formal level, utterly normal. The two countries enjoy ordinary diplomatic
relations; there is a robust market for air travel between the countries, one
that is returning to normal after a COVID-era
disruption; and, most famously, the two nations are seemingly locked into a
trade relationship that is politically thorny but apparently inescapable as an
economic matter.
About that trade relationship, some clarification often
is needed. China is the third-largest single-country market for U.S. exports,
behind (surprise!) Canada and Mexico, our rich neighbor to the north and our
less-rich neighbor to the south, countries with which the United States has
enjoyed a long and productive relationship of open trade. U.S. exports to China
($150 billion in 2022) are well less than half of U.S. exports to either Canada
($357 billion) or Mexico ($324 billion). U.S. exports to China also are well
below those to the European Union ($350 billion). Total U.S. exports exceed $2
trillion a year. What that means is that our economic relationship with China
is one of convenience and not, as would-be isolationists sometimes insist, one
of dependency.
Exports are politically easy. Imports are politically
fraught, thanks in large part to the economic illiteracy of Americans who elect
politicians promising to protect them from being victimized by abundance and
low prices. For millennia, kings and emperors fielded armies and navies to keep
trade routes open and to establish trade relationships that would enrich their
kingdoms. That was then. Today, the world brings everything it has to offer to
our shores and lays it down at Americans’ feet—and, somehow, this is a crisis.
But, of course, it isn’t.
The problem with the U.S.-China trade relationship is not
the economic aspect, whatever Biden or Trump wants you to believe. It may be
a moral problem: Surely I am not the only American who would
be willing to pay twice as much for a screwdriver if I could walk into Harbor
Freight and buy one that wasn’t manufactured in a single-party police state by
a Beijing-backed cartel that might very well employ slave labor. But, in spite
of what our economic nationalists insist, it isn’t the cartelization and the
slave labor that makes Chinese manufacturing competitive; in the long run,
these woeful features of Chinese governance probably make local firms less competitive.
(As you might expect, given the nature of the regime, China suffers from
massive misallocation of capital and consequent
economic problems.) In the case of the aforementioned tools and many other
manufactured goods, you can find comparable products at comparable prices made
by Chinese people working in a very free market in Taiwan. And you can find
other alternatives of non-Chinese origin, if you look a bit.
Which is to say: The problem with the U.S.-China
relationship isn’t that the scheming corporatists in Beijing are putting price
pressure on tool manufacturers in Wisconsin. U.S. manufacturing has been kicking ass and taking names
for a very long time, and output has been at or near record highs in recent
years. U.S. manufacturing output today is five times what it was in the
supposed golden days of the 1950s and 1960s.
The problem with the U.S.-China relationship is, in
effect, everything except the economic cooperation between the countries, which
has—icky though the fact may make us feel sometimes—left both countries better
off. The problem Washington should have with China is that China is a
single-party police state with a nuclear arsenal and plans to dominate its
region and ultimately to replace the United States at the apex of power. The
question of whether the United States is better off with a richer China than it
would have been with a poorer China is a legitimate one; my own view is that a
poorer China would have been even more brutal than the China we have today and
that, having less to lose, it would have been even more prone to disruptive
behavior. Notice that the recent economic troubles in China have left the
regime more aggressive rather than more accommodating.
Our problem with China is not fundamentally an economic
one. And so it isn’t a problem that is going to be fixed with tariffs.
At the same time, the situation necessarily must be
tense—and precarious—when the United States maintains a seemingly normal and
fruitful economic relationship with China while our relationship with the
country is strained and thoroughly abnormal at the highest level. The status
quo is effectively that the United States and China intend to go on making
money from one another while they wait—and prepare—to go to war with one
another. That war would be catastrophic, but it is not an inevitability.
How should the U.S. proceed, given the reality of our
relationship with China? It is remarkable how little serious thought seems to
have been given to the issue by the people in Washington who might make a
difference. The Biden administration, for its part, is preoccupied with trying
to gin up a few new electric-vehicle jobs at China’s expense in the hopes that
the promise of more will pull the president over the line in November in a few
old Rust Belt constituencies that have threatened to abandon Biden and his
party for reasons that are, in general, more than understandable. As short-term
and shallow thinking goes, that wins the gold medal.
On the other hand, we already know what kind of man the
Trump administration is going to listen to when it comes to China: Currently
incarcerated nut
cutlet Peter Navarro tops the list. Expect more tariff talk—more of the
same.
But the emblem of our trouble with Beijing isn’t the
“Made in China” label on all the flip-flops in Walmart. It is those 14 enemies
of the state in Hong Kong. If there is somebody in Washington who understands
that, he should try to introduce himself to Joe Biden or commit whatever kind
of crime is necessary to catch the attention of Donald Trump these days.
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