USA vs. China Ways (5.4)

David W Wang
3 min readJul 20, 2021

What’s the True Nature of US-China Trade War?

US and China officially started a trade war in summer 2018. There are of course multiple factors playing into this process. Before this, the two countries already had many trade related disputes like Intelligent Property protection, anti-dumping act, and trade deficit reduction, etc.

The difference is in the past the two countries would sit down and negotiate. But the US side gradually came up with two main frustrations: first seems the marathon like negotiation rarely produce good real results; second, even with some negotiated results, the implementation of the agreement was often a disappointment. Then one would naturally question: why would we waste time in negotiating this anyway in the first place?

Then when Donald Trump took office in 2017, he decided he would do something differently to reduce the huge trade deficit (around $500 million) between the US and China. He would raise the Chinese import tariff to up to 25% in order to force the Chinese side to balance things out.

China would argue a lot of their US export are US company outsourcing products but to the US it may not make much a difference. What is trade? It’s goods exchanges between two parties. If there’s some deficit from the trade relations, that’s normal. But if the deficits go too bid, then that’s not fair…

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David W Wang
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Based in Washington DC metro, a senior analyst and columnist on US-China relations and political cultures. Best-seller Publication: Decoding Dragon’s Mindset