Raja Krishnamoorthi
World leaders are faced with a strategic choice that will define global prosperity and our national security for a generation. As China faces an economic slowdown at home, Beijing is doubling down on its drive to be the world's manufacturing superpower and is exporting the resulting overcapacity at artificially low prices. Surges of cheap Chinese exports are poised to devastate market-constrained producers in the United States and around the world.
China's leaders are betting that world leaders will fail to mount a unified response and hoping that they can run the same playbook that has worked for them in the past. We are at a pivotal moment in which China depends on the rest of the world capitulating to its predatory practices to avoid making long-overdue reforms. But once this surge of cheap Chinese products makes its way to our markets, it has the potential to destroy production capacity here in the United States and around the world, and thereby make all of us more dependent on China for our daily needs for a generation to come.
If we don't take decisive action, we risk repeating the "China Shock" that reverberated across the United States after China joined the World Trade Organization. This shock had a devastating impact on the U.S. industrial base, leading to hollowing out U.S. manufacturing facilities across the country and the communities that supported them in every state. According to some estimates, imbalances in our trade relationship with China has led to the loss of more than 3.7 million American jobs, with three-quarters of those jobs in manufacturing. In my home state of Illinois, more than 160,000 jobs were lost, with my district losing more than 15,000 jobs, making it one of the most heavily impacted districts in one of the most heavily impacted states in the country. We cannot let this happen again on our watch.
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