The Trade War Is Justified

Ying Ma

Security, Asia

Beijing wasn't going to liberalize, and Washington needed to push back against unfair practices.

The raging U.S.-China trade war has inspired much commentary on America’s China policy. The conventional narrative among the foreign-policy establishment is that the United States has engaged with China because for too long, Washington has mistakenly believed that trade would weaken the Chinese Communist government and bring greater political freedoms to China.

Increasingly, one could walk away from such discussions not knowing that two decades ago, U.S. support for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which drastically expanded Washington-Beijing bilateral trading relationship, had anything to do trade and economics.

Certainly, China has disappointed Washington both politically and economically, and has emerged as America’s most potent strategic rival. Yet devising solutions to China’s challenge requires that policymakers not fall into amnesia. As such, a walk down memory lane is a useful exercise.

Today, a broad consensus has emerged on both the left and right that China simply has not become the responsible stakeholder in the international system that then-Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick exhorted it to be in 2005. “Closed politics cannot be a permanent feature of Chinese society,” Zoellick said, summing up many U.S. policymakers hopes. “It is simply not sustainable—as economic growth continues, better-off Chinese will want a greater say in their future, and pressure builds for political reform.”

The Trump administration, for one, believes that these assumptions have turned out to be false. In its National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2018, the administration spelled out its frustrations. “For decades,” the NSS said, “U.S. policy was rooted in the belief that support for China’s rise and for its integration into the post-war international order would liberalize China.” Instead, today’s stronger and richer China wants to “shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests. [It] seeks to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favor.”