Midway through a news briefing Tuesday, the blue-clad reporter had enough. A fellow journalist in a red jacket beside her was asking how Beijing would keep tabs on overseas investment under President Xi Jinping’s Belt-and-Road infrastructure program.
Her query meandered. “The transformation of the role of state-assets supervision, centered on capital management, is currently a subject of widespread concern,” she said, then kept talking.
The clock ticked.
Disdain appeared to creep across the face of the woman in blue as she listened to the roughly-45-second softball.
When the woman in red finally got around to her main question, the woman in blue had raised a fist to her chin and furrowed her eyebrows. She cast sideways glances at the speaker and around her. Then, with a toss of the head, she executed an eye-roll to make Miley Cyrus proud.
For viewers, it was a rare flash of unscripted emotion amid stage-managed tedium. “It was like she was expressing frustration on behalf of the rest of us” over the scripted nature of the event, says Zhang Lifan, a Beiijng-based independent historian who has written critically about the government.
A meme was born, setting phones vibrating around China.
.. The eye-roller, Liang Xiangyi, a television reporter for Shanghai-based Yicai Media Group, emerged as a kind of folk hero for those tired of the turgid pageantry.
.. A Tuesday column on Chinese online-media firm Sina Corp.’s technology news portal attempted to explain why people roll their eyes: “Human eyes feature more white areas than those of other primates, therefore we have a special ability to communicate through eyeball rotation.”
.. Ms. Liang “was like an innocent child who blurted out that the emperor has no clothes,” Mr. Qin says, adding that the incident allowed “ordinary people with no opportunity to participate in politics to express their scorn and discontent in a roundabout way.”
.. “It means that what we crave in these sham, everything’s-great events is something real.”
Some Things Are True Even if Trump Believes Them
One of the hardest things to accept for all of us who want Donald Trump to be a one-term president is the fact that some things are true even if Donald Trump believes them! And one of those things is that we have a real trade problem with China. Imports of Chinese goods alone equal two-thirds of the global U.S. trade deficit today.
.. he’s so weirdly obsessed with protecting “manly” industries like coal, steel and aluminum that affect our allies more than China — and he’s built such a chaotic policymaking process and unilaterally surrendered so much leverage to Beijing — that he can’t be relied upon to navigate the China trade issue in our national interest.
.. David Autor, the M.I.T. economist who’s done some of the most compelling research on the impacts of China trade
.. the “shock” that China delivered to U.S. lower-tech manufacturers in the years right after Beijing joined the World Trade Organization in 2001
.. roughly 40 percent of the decline in U.S. manufacturing between 2000 and 2007 was due to a surge in imports from China primarily after it joined the W.T.O.
.. it led to the sudden loss of about one million factory jobs in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Trump won all of those states.
.. This “China shock,” said Autor, led not only to mass unemployment but also to social disintegration, less marriage, more opioid abuse and more people dropping out of the labor market and requiring government aid.
.. “International trade creates diffuse benefits and concentrated costs,”
.. has created identifiable losers in trade-impacted industries
.. We assumed that China would “reform and open” after it joined the W.T.O.,
.. Instead, China “reformed and closed.” So China kept a 25 percent tariff on new cars imported from the U.S. (our tariff is 2.5 percent)
.. China grew its companies behind a wall of protection, fed them with state funds and, when they were competitive enough, unleashed them on the world
.. “Chinese and foreign makers are about to start sending huge numbers of fully built cars to the U.S. We are about to see a big increase in the U.S. trade deficit in automotive in the next several years.”
.. U.S. tech firms, like Apple, that want to offer cloud services to Chinese citizens have to store the data in China on servers operated by a Chinese partner. The U.S. has no such regulation.
.. “if they don’t accept demands to partner with Chinese companies and store data in China, then they risk losing access to the lucrative Chinese market, despite fears about trade secret theft and the rights of Chinese customers.”
.. “no US auto company is allowed to own even 50% of their own factory in China, but there are five 100% China-owned EV auto companies in the US.”
.. American electric vehicle (E.V.) companies operating in China are forced to have a Chinese partner and transfer technology to them.
.. they are also playing by a set of rules that others would be naïve to ignore.
.. So what would a smart American president do? First, he’d sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord. TPP eliminated as many as 18,000 tariffs on U.S. exports
.. focused on protecting what we do best — high-value-added manufacturing and intellectual property.
.. China was not in TPP. It was a coalition built, in part, to pressure Beijing into fairer market access, by our rules. Trump just gave it up for free.
.. “Since you like your trade rules so much, we’re going to copy them for your companies operating in America: 25 percent tariffs on your cars, and your tech companies that open here have to joint venture and share intellectual property with a U.S. partner — and store all their data on U.S. servers.”
.. Having a really tough trade negotiation with China on manufacturing and high technology, but doing it in secret, makes sense to me.
Starting a public trade war with our allies over aluminum and steel that raises the costs for our manufacturers, that doesn’t protect our growth industries and that loses allies that we need to deal with China makes absolutely no sense.
.. We needed to be, and still need to be, much more serious, and generous, about creating “wage insurance” and community reinvestment policies for people and places whose employers are suddenly wiped out by a trade shock.
.. tax incentives, Pell grants, community colleges — to create the conditions for every American to be constantly upgrading skills
.. Too much of the economic discussion of late “has been focused on the 1 percent versus the 99 percent,” observed Autor. “It’s become a kind of ‘inequality porn’
.. You lose sight of the fact that there is a dramatic rise in the economic return to tangibly acquiring skills — skills that are available and should be within everyone’s reach.”
.. The lack of real meritocracy in our country today, he added, “is not about the returns to realized skills. It is about the inequality in the ability to acquire those skills.
.. If you get educated in America today, and have a good work ethic, you are going to be rewarded.’
.. What does education do? It gives you a skill set and enables you to adapt to change better.
And cities and towns anchored by universities tend to reinvent themselves more easily; they’re engines of adaptation.
U.S. allies see Trump’s steel tariffs as an insult
No world leader has tried harder to get on President Trump’s good side than Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Whether racing to New York the day after the 2016 election and presenting Trump with a $3,755 gold-plated golf driver, or taking him out on the golf course and serving hamburgers for lunch, Abe has cultivated a close personal relationship with his American counterpart.
.. But now, Japan, which is not just led by a friendly politician but also is a key security ally of the United States, looks likely to be slapped with tariffs on its steel exports to the United States. And to add insult to injury, the reason, Trump says, is rooted in national security.
“The U.S. is suddenly treating Japan as a target,” said Tsuyoshi Kawase, a professor of international trade policy at Sophia University in Tokyo. “The Japanese side is bewildered and confused.”
.. countries that figured, no matter the bumps in relations with Washington, they would wind up on the same side against China in any dispute over steel or unfair trade practices. And yet suddenly there is talk of a trade war between the United States and its supposed friends... Even those leaders who have grown accustomed to the zigs and zags of the Trump White House say this could be different. The consequences of Trump’s targeting other priorities — the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal chief among them — have not had an immediate, concrete effect. But the tariffs could soon put citizens in ally nations out of work, and if a trade war escalates, all sides could feel the pain, officials from Brasília to Brussels to Seoul say.“The impulsiveness of the decision caught us by surprise,” said Diego Bonomo, the head of foreign trade at the National Trade Association of Brazil. His country is the second-largest exporter of steel to the United States.“It’s an economic shot in the foot,” he said. “When they impose tariffs to hurt Brazilian steel, they hurt their own coal exports and exports of products that use steel.”
.. Trump’s order came hours after Japan and 10 other countries formalized a new Pacific free-trade agreement
.. The announcement also upended a Saturday meeting of the top U.S., E.U. and Japanese trade negotiators, who were originally scheduled to convene to talk about how to take on what they say is China’s unfair support for its steel industry. Instead, officials say, the meeting may turn out to be the first salvo in an unfolding and escalating trade skirmish.
.. The frustration is compounded by Trump’s national security rationale. In fact, say U.S. allies, there is no national security risk to importing steel and aluminum from one’s closest military partners. And any move that damages their own industries also hits at overall NATO readiness and hurts trust among allies, they say.
.. But that response could backfire, some analysts say. If the WTO rules against the White House, and Trump chooses to ignore the ruling, that could effectively spell the end of the organization.
.. “To be honest, everyone kind of agrees with us,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss closed-door European efforts. “I haven’t found anyone who says, ‘No no, the president is right.’ ”
.. The prospect of steel tariffs follows on the heels of similar levies on solar panels and washing machines. But it comes at a sensitive time on the front of North Korean diplomacy.
.. tariffs could have a “negative impact on South Korea-U.S. relations,”
.. Many in Japan worry that Trump’s effort may ultimately undermine global security, not bolster it.
“When trade friction grows between allies, the alliance is weakened,” Watanabe said. “But it’s unclear if Trump understands that.”
Trump Alienates Allies Needed for a Trade Fight With China
China’s predatory trade behavior is threatening sectors much more vital than steel and aluminum
“Beijing has doubled down on its state capitalist model even as it has gotten richer,” Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner, who both served in foreign-policy roles under former President Barack Obama, write in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. “Cooperative and voluntary mechanisms to pry open China’s economy have by and large failed.”
.. But Mr. Trump has consistently rejected collective action in favor of going it alone. His officials downgraded multilateral efforts to reduce steel overcapacity. In January 2017, Mr. Obama’s administration launched a case at the WTO against China for subsidizing aluminum, but Mr. Trump has failed to follow up.
.. since 2003 China has four times promised to address overcapacity in steel production, as its actual capacity quadrupled to roughly half the world total.
.. Yet China exports little steel to the U.S. because of existing duties and accounts for just 11% of its aluminum imports, far behind Canada. The Commerce Department argued for a global remedy because Chinese production depresses global prices and drives foreign producers out of third markets, and they then ship to the U.S.
This means the pain of Mr. Trump’s tariffs will fall not on China but on actors that play by the rules, including Canada, Japan and the European Union. When the EU threatened to retaliate, Mr. Trump said he would escalate by raising duties on European cars.
Chinese misbehavior has thus brought the U.S. to the brink of trade war with its own economic and strategic allies, echoing how Russian meddling has served to fuel internal strife in Europe and the U.S.
.. Chinese forced technology transfer, commercial espionage and intellectual-property theft, all aimed at creating Chinese champions in key industries by 2025.
These pose a far greater threat to U.S. technological leadership and the enormous value it adds to U.S. exports than do growing imports of steel and aluminum which, while vital to some communities, are commodities.
.. The U.S. is preparing a sweeping penalty against China, but it would be more effective if done jointly; otherwise, Beijing may simply persuade others to hand over their technology in exchange for Chinese sales or capital.
.. Most of all, though, it requires Mr. Trump to understand where leverage comes from.
“Chinese misbehavior with respect to intellectual property and economic espionage is a real problem that requires a response,” Patrick Toomey, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, said in an interview. “We are much more likely to get our allies to work with us if we aren’t punishing them for selling us steel that our consumers want to buy.”