Donald Trump's rhetoric on China and trade has been blunt, to say the least. " We can't continue to allow China to rape our country — and
Donald Trump’s rhetoric on China and trade has been blunt, to say the least.
“We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country — and that’s what they’re doing, ” he said at a May 2016 campaign rally. “It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world. ”
His tone was a bit more measured leading up to his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, though the message was similar: The U. S. must be tough on China when it comes to trade.
“The meeting next week with China will be a very difficult one in that we can no longer have massive trade deficits … and job losses, ” the president wrote across two tweets. Trump continued, “American companies must be prepared to look at other alternatives. ”
Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric was great politics during the campaign. But the hard truth is that getting those jobs back from China just won’t happen — indeed, China isn’t primarily responsible for manufacturing job losses in recent years. But if Trump is concerned about the jobs lost to China, there are other steps he can take right now, some of which don’t at all involve negotiating with President Xi.
What exactly has (and hasn’t) the U. S. lost to China?
The U. S. has most definitely lost jobs to China. In perhaps the most commonly cited recent paper on the matter, a group of economists led by MIT’s David Autor found that between 1990 and 2007, Chinese import competition accounted for the loss of 1 million manufacturing jobs — about 25 percent of the total manufacturing job loss over that period.
(In fact, Trump may want to thank Xi for all his country’s exports; those same economists plus Lund University’s Kaveh Majlesi found in a January paper that, all other things being equal, if “the growth in Chinese import penetration had been 50 percent lower than the actual growth” in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania than it was between 2000 and 2016, those states would have chosen Hillary Clinton, and she would have won the Electoral College.)
In addition, China has not lived up to a variety of commitments it made when it joined the World Trade Organization, according to a January report from the U. S. trade representative’s office. In areas including intellectual property protections, the government’s favoring of state-owned enterprises and “troubling agricultural policies that block U. S. market access, ” the USTR said the Chinese government could stand to improve.
“Is a country like China different, and is it more likely that they are — cheating isn’t necessarily the right word, but — doing more of these kinds of things that are more worrisome than other countries? ” said Chad Bown, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “And I think the answer to that is probably yes. ”
So there are reasons for concern regarding the U. S. trade relationship with China. But if China did indeed suck 25 percent of manufacturing jobs out of the U. S. over nearly two decades, that leaves about 75 percent of those jobs that weren’t lost to China.
What happened? Automation is a huge factor here. U. S. factories simply grew more efficient over time. In fact, while the number of manufacturing jobs plummeted — manufacturing output nevertheless grew.
“I used to go out on an auto factory floor and it looks like Fifth Avenue in New York at Christmastime, ” said Carla Hills, who served as U.
