Our economic policy with regard to China has been wrong for almost 20 years. We were wrong in the late 1990s to believe that the Chinese Communist Party was committed to pro-market reform for the long term. We were wrong in the mid 2000s to discourage the U.S. government from retaliating against discriminatory Chinese regulations. We were wrong as recently as two years ago when we, Democrats and Republicans alike, failed to see how much trade with China had contributed to populist anger.
There is, one could say, huge room for improvement in economic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This does not mean that all the ideas President Trump and his key aides have floated will make things better. We cannot turn back the clock, and the American manufacturing sector cannot simply return to where it was before China joined the World Trade Organization in late 2001.
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