Conflict over China’s industrial policies is at the center of a trade war that’s set to escalate should President Donald Trump go ahead with planned tariff
BEIJING – Conflict over China’s industrial policies is at the center of a trade war that’s set to escalate should President Donald Trump go ahead with planned tariffs on another $200 billion of Chinese goods as soon as this week.
The core of those industrial policies is the Made in China 2025 plan to dominate industries from robotics to new-energy vehicles and aerospace. A key element of that blueprint is an unofficial document that’s slipped largely under the radar: The Made in China 2025 Major Technical Roadmap, better known as the Green Book after the color of its original cover.
Whereas the official Made in China 2025 plan has no specific targets for Chinese companies to seize domestic and global market share and even says implementation must be dominated by markets, the Green Book’s 296 pages are full of goals. They are jaw-dropping targets, too, that if met would virtually lock foreign companies out of many industrial segments in China and threaten market disruption for businesses across the globe.
China says the targets are nonbinding and unofficial. It is committed to ensuring that the official Made in China 2025 plan and other relevant policies are applied equally to both local and foreign companies in China, Minister for Industry and Information Technology Miao Wei wrote in an April article in the state-run China Daily newspaper. The ministry didn’t respond to faxed questions seeking comments on the Green Book.
But foreign lobby groups and some trade experts see the Green Book as cover for industrial targets to keep them out of official documents, where they would attract greater scrutiny from foreign governments and possibly the World Trade Organization.
“High-level guidance directs industrial policies in China and then lower levels of government follow with implementation plans,” said Jeremie Waterman, president of the China Center at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. “The approach is to ensure plausible deniability, in part. In many industries now there’s a sense that a certain percentage of procurement is reserved for the domestic champions.”
The Green Book was first published in October 2015 by the National Manufacturing Strategy Advisory Committee and updated most recently in January without its green cover.
