The Trump administration is right to push back against China's violations of world trade rules, particularly with regard to advanced technologies. But US high-tech industries' ability to weather the challenge posed by China will depend less on curbing China’s progress, and more on supporting innovation at home.
As Japan prepares to host its first G20 leaders’ summit later this month, little remains of the open and cooperative spirit that marked the first such gathering in 2008. But although the United States will most likely continue its protectionist drift, other G20 countries should use the occasion to make a clear case for free trade.
Policy gurus spend too much time with others like them – top civil servants, high-flying journalists, successful businesspeople – and too little time with ordinary voters. If they could become “humble, competent people on a level with dentists,” as John Maynard Keynes once suggested, voters might identify with them and find them trustworthy.
For Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, appeasing US President Donald Trump is not so much a choice as a necessity: he must prove to Japan’s people and their neighbors, particularly the Chinese, that he knows how to keep Trump on his side. But Abe's strategy won't work with a US administration as fickle and self-serving as Trump’s.
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BERKELEY – With its ambitious Made in China 2025 strategy, China has made clear its objective to secure global economic leadership in advanced technology industries. This places it in direct competition with the United States – which currently leads in those industries – in what is emerging as an undeclared but intensifying cold war over technologies with both commercial and military applications.
With its investments in such dual-use technologies, China is seeking more than to compete commercially with the US; it is also seeking greater military and geopolitical power. And it has deployed a variety of methods – including weak intellectual property (IP) protections, technology transfers as a condition for joint ventures with Chinese partners, evasion of export controls, and regulatory harassment – to acquire such technologies from the US and other trading partners.
China’s intentions and practices have long been an irritant in Sino-American relations. The so-called Section 301 trade investigation launched by President Donald Trump’s administration last year charged that China’s trade and industrial policies, which provide advantages to specific technology industries, violate both US and international trade law.
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