A good explanation of what is really happening from Gordon Chang writing at The Daily Beast:
Trump’s Right to Say He’s Not Launching a Trade War With China. He’s Doing Something Bigger.
Hours ago, President Trump, acting under the authority of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, instructed U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to consider the imposition of tariffs on $100 billion of Chinese goods. These tariffs are on top of those Lighthizer proposed Tuesday on $50 billion of China’s products. All these duties are intended to remedy China’s theft of American intellectual property.
“We are not in a trade war with China,” President Trump tweeted Wednesday morning.
The president is correct. What looks like a trade war is really a struggle for the control of the technologies that will dominate coming decades.
China has been doing two things. First, have been buying American companies and second, any US company who wants to manufacture and sell their products in China has to give the Chinese the technology used in that product. This Intellectual Property drain needs to be stopped.
Yet the current relationship between China and the U.S. needs to be disrupted. Chinese theft of intellectual property is sapping American innovation and therefore America’s economy. The IP Commission, in a 2017 update (PDF) to its landmark 2013 report, estimates the U.S. each year loses somewhere between $225 billion to $600 billion in intellectual property through predatory means. It almost goes without saying that most of that loss is, directly or indirectly, to China.
So true - this is a war for the future, not just a few dollars of trade. President Trump is doing the right thing.
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