New Delhi, Sep 26 (IANS) : The current global tariff measures targeting Chinese goods represent not a bilateral spat between Washington and Beijing but a broader trade war between China and much of the rest of the world, a new report has said.
The report from Defense.info cited a piece in The Australian Financial Review which highlighted a proposed joint statement at a recent G20 finance ministers’ meeting, calling on countries with “excessive and persistent external surpluses” to remove the distortions producing them.
The proposal was supported by 19 nations, and China alone voted against it, an analyst Ross Babbage, said pointing it was a sign of growing international isolation of China.
The report said democracies, developing economies and industrial powers with little else in common have converged on similar trade responses to China’s industrial rise.
“The tariff wall now being built against Chinese electric vehicles spans political systems and economic models that agree on almost nothing else: 102 per cent in the United States, 75-125 per cent in India, 80-125 per cent in Thailand, 60 per cent in Pakistan, 65-95 per cent in Egypt, a quota-plus-100 per cent arrangement in Canada, a flat 200 per cent on Chinese light manufactured goods in Indonesia,” the report noted.
The scale of the production imbalance is huge, the report noted, adding that China’s manufacturing output, half that of the United States in 2004, is now double.
China’s manufacturing dominance rests on the foundation of a protected domestic market that allows firms to scale, along with state subsidies far above those in other major economies.
Further, China’s currency, which the IMF has judged undervalued by 20‑40 per, makes Chinese exports artificially cheap and foreign imports into China artificially expensive.
The report also noted “an extensive state apparatus, commercial intelligence, industrial-scale IP theft, cyber operations, information campaigns, and the corruption of foreign officials and executives, that operates alongside and in support of Chinese companies abroad.”
