Jake's View | This Christmas, Americans would do well to remember who they owe their gifts and prosperity to
Few Americans get the interconnections of the global economy. They are told by their president and his shills to bite the hands that give them all their gifts and prosperity.
There is consensus in Washington that China’s economic policy is unfair and there are violations of many WTO and bilateral commitments. In the coming months we are going to see a lot of rhetoric translate into actions that try to push China to address concerns of the US in economic policies.
Scott Kennedy, Centre for Strategic and International Studies
SCMP, December 19
Is it true that China has broken the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and many bilateral commitments?
It would not surprise me. The way things are seen in Beijing, China must sign up for these international trade arrangements or see the access of its export industries to many world markets restricted, or even denied.
But Beijing reads “American”, where others see the word “international”, and is rightly suspicious of American imperialism. It has the example of much of Latin America to think of, and it will not be made another coffee, sugar, copper or banana republic enslaved to US interests. One Batista Cuba was enough.
China is also worried that its nascent industries will never emerge from the cradle if they are pushed back into it by the much stronger offspring of American corporations allowed to operate in China. Thus where technology is concerned, the WTO gets only lip service. All else is polite defiance.
And it is not as if the United States is itself guiltless. Its own industrial emergence was heavily based on the theft of European inventions, its railroad barons repeatedly cheated their European investors and its Smoot-Hawley tariff of the 1930s is still a byword for trade repression across the world.
