Opinion | The real target of Trump’s trade war is ‘Made in China 2025’
US officials’ outrage at China having the temerity to resort to the standard tools of industry policy is the height of hypocrisy, writes David Dodwell
Those who credit Donald Trump’s trade policy team with a modicum of strategic intelligence insist that the unfolding trade war is actually nothing to do with tariffs, steel and aluminium or even cars.
They argue that the real aim is to use this highly visible tariff blunderbuss to soften China up for the real challenge – which is to attack barriers to foreign companies competing in China’s internal market, and to slow its progress in developing technologies that directly threaten the West’s technology leaders. So the real target is Xi Jinping’s “Made in China 2025”.
The base US case is made clearly by a research assistant at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, Lorand Laskai. Laskai starts with the US government’s huge report justifying the section 301 initiatives against China, calling it “a searing indictment of China’s disregard for intellectual property, discrimination against foreign firms, and use of preferential industrial policies to unfairly bolster Chinese firms.”
He says the “Made in China” policy has “riled governments around the world”, and is “shaping up to be the central villain, the real existential threat to US technological leadership”.
Laskai is definitely onto something here. China is without doubt tackling its structural economic weaknesses, trying to move up the production value-chain by bringing more high-value-adding work to the mainland, and trying to develop strength in seriously high technologies that have until today been the exclusive domain of American and European companies.