China would do well for itself to get its unsustainable trade imbalance with the U.S. out of the way — quickly and resolutely, Michael Ivanovitch writes.
Beijing's incantations about"win-win cooperation" and its alleged search of a harmonious"great power relationship" ring hollow when confronted with an unwisely excessive and systematic trade surplus China maintains with the United States.
None of that can be seen in China's relations with the present U.S. administration. In the course of 2017, China's trade surplus on American trades increased 8.1 percent. Last year, the growth of China's trade surplus accelerated to 12 percent, with its exports to the U.S. surging 17.4 percent, to a whopping $594 billion, while China's purchases from the U.S. fell 7.4 percent to the pitiful $120.3 billion.
Second, with such a sincere show of good faith, Beijing should adopt regulatory changes offering internationally comparable guarantees for the protection of intellectual property and prohibition of forced technology transfers to Chinese joint-venture partners. China's apparently large panoply of non-tariff barriers to trade should also be dismantled.
Fourth, the IMF consultations and the OECD's biannual examinations would provide unimpeachable expert opinions on China's monetary policies and its managed floating exchange rate. That would preserve China's monetary sovereignty and offer much-needed advice about the country's highly sensitive capital account transactions.
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