Ring of Fire: Tremors & Eruptions in US-China Trade War

https://thediplomat.com/2018/04/ring-of-fire-tremors-and-eruptions-in-the-u-s-china-trade-war/ Ring of Fire: Tremors and Eruptions in the US-China Trade War Threats and counter-threats may well produce losers all around. By  HYPERLINK "https://thediplomat.com/authors/roncevert-ganan-almond/" Roncevert Ganan Almond April 12, 2018 On April 5, 1815, Mount Tambora erupted on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies, present day Indonesia. Located along the “Ring of Fire” – the seismic belt surrounding the Pacific Ocean – the volcano’s blast was one of the most severe in recorded history. Nearly 800 miles away in Java, Thomas Stamford Raffles, the lieutenant-governor of British Java and founder of colonial Singapore, mistook the thunderous bang for cannon fire. The eruption’s ash plume was so vast that it literally changed the world’s climate, lowering global temperatures for years. The following year, 1816, became known as the “Year without Summer” as the persistent chill from the sun-blocking ash cloud killed crops and disrupted commerce across the globe, from China to America. This foreboding environment inspired Mary Shelley to pen her masterpiece Frankenstein, a tale drawing upon human ambivalence and fear in the face of technology and industrialization. Perhaps it was timely, then, that just over two hundred years later, on April 5, 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump likewise erupted in fury, announcing a new salvo in the U.S.-China trade war that threatens to cast a choking cloud over the global economy. This round in the dispute between Washington and Beijing should be distinguished from and elevated above prior iterations, which include the solar panel-sorghum episode and the tit-for-tat tiff involving U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs and corresponding Chinese tariffs on $3 billion of U.S. exports like pork and fruit. Instead, this fight more clearly represents the essential struggle between the United States and China over strategic technological breakthroughs and competing stations within the global economy. As set forth in Trump’s National Security Strategy, the United States claims that in order to compensate for its “own systemic weakness” stemming from a “state-driven economic model,” China steals proprietary technology and early-stage ideas from the U.S. private sector, thereby undercutting American prosperity and hijacking the “innovation of free societies.” In Beijing’s version, as articulated by President Xi Jinping, China faces a unique set of challenges and has successfully adopted a strategy of “socialist modernization” to speed its development while preserving its independence. To the extent Western companies transfer technology to Chinese partners, Beijing’s narrative goes, they do so voluntarily in pursuit of enrichment within Chinese borders. The truth may lie somewhere in between and may otherwise be irrelevant in this context. But before tackling the broader geostrategic issues at play, we should review the remarkable unfolding of events in the U.S.-China trade clash and specific grievances underlying the United States’ recent actions. Trading Barbs At first glance, the speed and timing of events seem surprising and haphazard, but this flashpoint in...