Zhang Erzhen & Dai Xiang: Theoretical Thinking in Sino-US Trade Friction

Release time:2019-04-28Author: Zhang Erzhen & Dai Xiang

 Unlike trade protectionism, which usually occurs during economic depression, the United States provokes trade frictions against China and other countries under the overall good economic performance, and the reason lies in the unbalanced distribution of globalization benefits. Under the conditions of economic globalization characterized by the division of factors, on the one hand, from the perspective of static interests, although the United States has occupied the high-end of the value chain by virtue of its advantages in technology and other elements, which help it obtain most of the benefits in terms of value-added, but new changes have taken place in promoting dynamic interests such as industrial and economic development, which are more conducive to developing countries and this has had an impact on the international economic management system led by the United States with a lack of inclusiveness; on the other hand, under the conditions of the division of factors, the basic contradiction of capitalism presents a new form in developed countries such as the United States, which is prominently manifested in the traditional unbalanced relationship between "exploitation" and "exploited" between labor and capital, and has further evolved into the relationship between "abandonment" and "abandoned". Under the circumstance of prominent domestic system defects and lagging management capabilities, it has become a political choice of the Trump Administration to transfer the contradictions that have been intensified by the imbalance of internal benefit distribution to external factors, and adopt anti-globalization trade protectionism policies. To get out of the predicament of "anti-globalization", it is not only necessary to build a more inclusive global management system and rules, but also to further accelerate domestic reforms to provide institutional guarantees for the realization of inclusive development.