Trade war: China ‘risks disengagement with US unless it changes’
Long list of economic policy differences that must be addressed for both countries’ sake, Washington think tanks warn at Beijing forum
China must make substantial changes to its economic policies or it will face disengagement with its largest trading partners, American former officials and economists have warned in Beijing.
The suggestion that China could be left isolated in global trade came days after US Vice-President Mike Pence made a speech adding to concerns that an economic cold war was looming between the world’s two largest economies.
Monday’s visit by American scholars in Beijing – at a time of shrinking direct dialogue between academics of the two countries – came on the same day US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo paid a brief visit to Beijing marked by frosty talks. After his discussions, Pompeo said the two sides were stuck in “fundamental disagreement” over a range of issues, from bilateral trade to China’s domestic and foreign policies.
The US scholars – attending a seminar hosted by Peking University’s national school of development and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank in Washington – offered a stark assessment at the forum with Chinese academic counterparts including Justin Yifu Lin, the former chief economist of the World Bank who advises China’s top leadership, and Huang Yiping, an adviser to China’s central bank.
Derek Scissors, a resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, another Washington-based conservative think tank, said that confrontations over alleged theft of American companies’ intellectual property and state protection of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) would probably worsen if China sticks to its existing industrial policies.