Brett Christophers
America’s political and economic elites were once unruffled by the rise of China. Yes, Chinese GDP was growing fast, and yes, China’s share of global trade was growing equally rapidly. But this did not—or, at least, did not seem to—challenge America’s ongoing economic dominance. After all, the dollar was still king. The size and depth of China’s stock market continued to be dwarfed by the United States’. GDP per capita still weighed heavily in America’s favor. And the acknowledged global heavyweights of Big Tech—Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft—were American companies one and all. The basic posture vis-à-vis China was the following: You keep producing all that cheap stuff, we’ll keep on buying it, and you keep on financing the deficits that we accrue in the process.
Books in review
House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Companyby Eva DouBuy this book
Over the last decade, all of this has unraveled. During his first term in the White House, Donald Trump introduced a series of tariffs on Chinese imports, which sparked retaliatory measures from China and growing talk of a “trade war.” Under Joe Biden, the inflammatory language of the Trump 1.0 era became less conspicuous. Rather, in a break with the hegemony of neoliberalism, the Biden White House hailed a renaissance in “industrial policy”; his flacks talked about no longer being able to rely on market mechanisms to guide investment. But even if the tone had changed, the policy content was not much different: China was in the crosshairs. If anything, Biden’s China tariffs were more severe than those he inherited. In mid-2024, tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum were raised to 25 percent, on solar cells and panels to 50 percent, on electric vehicles to 100 percent; and in a parting gift to his successor, in January 2025, just as Biden was leaving office, a 50 percent tariff on Chinese semiconductors went into effect.
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