China’s Manufacturing Surge Needs a Global Response
Barron's
The following is an excerpt from Wendy Cutler and Jane Mellsop's op-ed in Barron’s. Wendy is Vice President at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) and the Managing Director of the Washington, D.C. office. Jane is the Director of Trade, Investment, and Economic Security at ASPI.
In a speech addressing U.S. steelworkers on Wednesday, President Joe Biden said that Chinese steel companies subsidized by the government are “not competing, they’re cheating.” He called for tariffs on Chinese aluminum and steel to be tripled from their existing rates to avoid a repeat of when cheap Chinese steel decimated the U.S. steel industry.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen shared U.S. concerns on growing Chinese overcapacity in the manufacturing sector during her recent visit to China. She made it clear that the U.S. would not accept a reality again which saw U.S. industries wiped out by a flood of artificially cheap Chinese goods.
China’s exports of huge quantities of artificially cheap, subsidized goods have global impacts. They include market distortions, downward pricing pressures, and weak profitability for manufacturers in other countries, leading to job losses and bankruptcies, while the unfairly traded goods gain greater global market share. In Yellen’s words, “China is now simply too large for the rest of the world to absorb this enormous capacity.”