General

Recently, Tu Yonghong, Deputy Director of IMI and Dean of the Yangtze River Economic Belt Research Institute of Renmin University of China, published an article. In her article, she pointed out that trade is an indispensable and important driving force for economic growth. Maintaining normal Sino US trade is conducive to optimizing resource allocation, improving total factor labor productivity, and improving the real income level of residents.

Last year, the United States promulgated the "Chip and Science Act" and the "Inflation Reduction Act", which have attracted strong opposition from many countries, including the European Union. Recently, Li Chenggang, the Permanent Representative of China to the WTO, pointed out sharply that the United States is "a perpetrator of unilateral bullying, a destroyer of the multilateral trading system, and a disrupter of the global industrial chain supply chain."; The Deputy Permanent Representative of the United States to the WTO, Pagan, criticized the WTO as "a shield for China's non market policies and actions.". The international community is concerned that once trade frictions between China and the United States intensify, the stability of the global industrial chain will be further impacted, making the world economy in recession even worse.

In an open economy, trade is an indispensable and important driving force for promoting economic growth. Trade helps countries make full use of their resource endowments, widely participate in international division of labor, gain economies of scale and technology spillovers, and accelerate the improvement of income levels and national well-being. Therefore, in the 1940s, when building a new international economic order after the end of World War II, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), with the purpose of promoting free trade (renamed WTO in the 1990s), became one of the three pillars of the international economic order. Economic globalization has pushed trade into a new stage of development, and the international division of labor has shifted from product refinement to parts and production. The role of multinational companies as trade organizers and promoters has become prominent. After China's entry into the WTO in 2001, multinational companies in Europe and the United States increased their investment in China, attracted by the advantages of cheap labor and financial openness policies. China has rapidly developed into a world factory, and its importance in the global industrial chain supply chain has continuously increased. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, under the guidance of new development concepts, China has comprehensively transformed its economic development model, strengthened innovation driven and high-quality development, added new momentum to emerging industries and the digital economy, contributed 30% of world economic growth, and replaced the United States as the world's largest trading country. At the same time, China has accelerated the construction of a new development pattern, optimized its trade structure, balanced its balance of payments, and reduced its economic dependence on foreign countries. The proportion of its trade surplus in GDP has decreased from 10% in 2007 to about 2% in 2001, further strengthening the autonomy and robustness of economic development. In the face of major changes that have not occurred in a century, the restructuring of the international trade pattern, and especially the steady narrowing of the economic aggregate gap between China and the United States, the anxiety of the United States about being overtaken by China and losing its dominant position is increasing. In addition, China is the largest source of US trade deficits, and some politicians with ulterior motives always use it to attack China and rob Americans of their jobs in order to win votes. Under the hegemonic logic of "giving priority to the United States" and curbing China's development, over the past decade, the United States has been using various pretexts to take protectionist measures against China, and has expanded from products to technology, from unilateral sanctions to "friendly outsourcing", which has led to escalating trade frictions between China and the United States. Trade between China and the United States has been significantly affected, with the United States slipping from China's largest trading partner to behind ASEAN and the European Union, China has fallen from the second largest trading partner of the United States to third, trailing Canada and Mexico.

China and the United States are the two largest economies in the world, at different stages of development. The per capita GDP of the United States exceeds 40000 US dollars, while China has just exceeded 10000 US dollars; The US economy is dominated by the service industry, which accounts for up to 80% of the economy, while China is the world's processing factory, with the service industry accounting for less than 60%. Although the political and economic systems of the two countries are different, their economies are highly complementary and have long formed an economic and trade pattern of American consumption and services, and Chinese manufacturing. This is the fundamental reason why, despite the intensification of trade frictions between China and the United States, China US trade still reached a record high of 760 billion US dollars in 2022.

Maintaining normal Sino US trade is conducive to optimizing resource allocation, improving total factor labor productivity, and improving the real income level of residents. The United States pursues protectionism, safeguarding the interests of specific groups and sacrificing the welfare of the entire people. This inevitably leads to reciprocal countermeasures by China, resulting in broader economic losses. The result can only be a win-win situation. China and the United States have their respective comparative advantages. The United States has a leading edge in the fields of high-tech and modern service industries, and also has a greater voice in international rulemaking. China has leading advantages in infrastructure, manufacturing, and the digital economy. The fields of economic complementarity between the two countries are far larger than those of direct competition, and objectively have a strong economic foundation for developing trade. China and the United States should increase high-level exchanges and fully understand and accommodate their respective interests and concerns; The United States should not generalize the concept of national security, arbitrarily sanction Chinese enterprises, and deprive China of the opportunity to develop high technology; China and the United States should move towards each other, seek the right way to get along, strengthen macro policy coordination, and gradually eliminate the imposition of additional commodity tariffs on each other; Encourage two-way direct investment and open up new tracks for climate change cooperation and more trade; Seek common ground while reserving differences, find a path to achieve "win-win", and jointly maintain the stability of the global industrial chain supply chain.