Chinese Think Tank Director Says Trade War Has Revealed US-Chinese Interdependence
NEW YORK -- The U.S. and China are intertwined, and revealing how deeply that is true is the silver lining of the trade war, according to Dr. Huiyao Wang, president for Center for China and Globalization, a Chinese think tank. Wang said the West mischaracterizes forced technology transfer, intellectual property theft and favoritism toward Chinese companies within China. He said that the American Chamber of Commerce in China is pleased about how the new IP protection law is going to be implemented, and he asked if forced technology transfer is such a burden, why don't you hear companies publicly complaining about it.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
He said China's development has lifted 800 million people out of poverty, and the fact that Walmart imports about 20 percent to 30 percent of its goods from China has held down inflation in the U.S. "We hope the first phase of the U.S.-China deal will be signed pretty soon," he said Nov. 6 at an International Trade Symposium co-sponsored by Finastra and The Economist.
Wang said phase 1 is "really good," but also suggested President Donald Trump might want to resolve the rest of the conflict before the next election, one year away. "It’s up to President Trump, you cannot expect a perfect deal," he said. He also complained that China is struggling with the tactics Trump has been using, with surprise increases in tariffs, and what he called "extreme pressure. "China is not used to the Art of the Deal applied to this state-to-state business," he said.
Wang, in response to a question from Economist trade editor Soumaya Keynes, said other countries aren't justified in complaining about the subsidies available to state-owned enterprises. "It’s actually a mixed economy, it’s a good hybrid," he said, with 60 percent of firms in the private sector, 20 percent multinational firms and 20 percent state-owned enterprises. He said that other countries also have SOEs, though China's state-owned segment "is a little larger."