Before anyone could take the first shot in President Trump’s threatened trade war, he and Chinese President Xi Jinping both found a way to save face. The steel tariffs that Trump had earlier announced have been put on hold pending further talks.
The tariffs are designed to protect American steel producers from market competition, so that the U.S. will emerge once again as a steelmaking power. Or so goes the theory goes.
The reality, as we have previously pointed out, is that steel tariffs destroy far more jobs in steel-consuming manufacturing industries (including carmakers) than they could ever preserve in steelmaking. That being the case, the current moment seems like a good time for Trump to look at the history of China, his negotiating adversary, for two important lessons about government, trade, and protectionism.
The first lesson is that openness and trade can make any nation great, even one that has just been ravaged by the human and economic destruction that communism inevitably brings.
In the years following Chairman Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, China’s economy and population were in ruins. The decade-long Cultural Revolution had come on the heels of the worst famine in human history, in which 20 to 50 million Chinese died because of communist mismanagement of the economy.
Get the Exclusive
04.16.2024