old salt wrote: ↑Wed Nov 18, 2020 5:03 pm
jhu72 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 18, 2020 4:19 pm
... not going to change China by not engaging with them. We had a chance to play the game on our home field with TPP. Now it is on China's homefield and we are on the outside looking in. This was a huge mistake.
Even China free trade maximalist Hank Paulson counsels against scaling back Trump's trade restrictions with concessions in return.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article ... procity-us
HRC campaigned against TPP too. Failed Obama sales job.
Always funny how the actual words get skewed by the writer. I've italicized Paulson's actual words to separate from the writer's slant on them.
Henry Paulson, a former US Treasury secretary long known as one of Washington’s strongest proponents of dialogue with Beijing, said President Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods should not be lifted without the US getting something in return.
“The American administration is about to change. But the clock will not simply be rewound,” Paulson said in a speech at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum on Monday. “
We should look to a punitive toolkit built on targeted reciprocity that includes jointly withholding access to our markets.”
His remarks were the latest sign that the dramatic, bipartisan, and negative shift in American attitudes toward China during the Xi Jinping era will not necessarily soften after Trump leaves office.
Tensions between the two countries have rapidly worsened in recent years over trade policy, human rights, and most recently the coronavirus. As Xi has tightened his grip on power in Beijing, both parties in Washington have increasingly come to see China as a destabilising and aggressive threat.
“The Trump administration was responding to real concerns of American people about China, and real failures of China to act as responsible global citizens,” said Paulson, who served as US Treasury secretary under George W Bush and in 2011 founded a think tank aimed at fostering the US-China relationship.
“
The question is how we respond to these legitimate issues,” Paulson said, suggesting the Biden administration use a policy he called “targeted reciprocity”.
“
Instead of President Trump’s emphasis on outdated, ineffective purchase agreements, we need to focus on the future by opening key areas to investment and export,” he said. “
We must tackle the market distortions of China’s state-owned firms. And we’ll need to deal with structural and process issues that include services, not just goods.”
“
The agreement should be done in phases with regular deliverables, beginning with easier issues that build momentum to tackle the tough ones,” he continued. “
In return the US should be prepared to open its own markets.”
In other words, smarter.
