An Unchanged Stand
China focuses on reforms and dialogue despite trade tensions
Ahead of the 13th round of bilateral trade talks between China and the U.S. in Washington, D.C., economists and entrepreneurs warned that U.S. President Donald Trump has set off a full-blown trade war by imposing several rounds of tariffs on Chinese goods, accusing China of “intellectual property theft” and sanctioning Chinese companies, thereby putting the global economy in danger.
Chinese Vice Premier Liu He led a delegation for another round of high-level consultations with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on October 10-11.
“This is not only a trade war; this is more and more looking like a significant decoupling, across issues from trade, education, technology and now financial flows,” Tom Orlik, chief economist of Bloomberg Economics, said at the 2019 China and the World Forum held at Columbia University in New York City on September 28.
The thought that emerged from the forum was that with China in an economic transition, its future growth would be less dependent on exports and more on domestic consumption.
False rationale
Jeffery Sachs, a noted economist and professor at Columbia University, talked about the false rationale behind the trade war, from Trump’s trade deficit theory to the America First ideology. “Economics is not a zero-sum game,” he said.
Regarding the U.S. accusation of currency manipulation against China, Sachs said, “We have laws and rules and definitions