By Professor Jeffrey Sachs
The latest campaign of the United States against China is the charge that China has excess capacity in a range of manufactured goods and so should restrain its exports. The truth is simpler. China and other countries of East Asia are the world’s low-cost producers of a range of high-quality industrial products that the world urgently needs: solar modules, electric vehicles, wind turbines, efficient batteries, 5G and more. Since the US lags behind China in these sectors, the US is bad-mouthing China, characterizing China’s success as some kind of alleged bad behaviour.
The US approach to China is based on a mix of arrogance, nastiness, and naivete. The arrogance is that the US runs the world, so how dare China have such economic success! The nastiness is that the US is actively out to hinder China’s progress. Progress in our world is hard enough without the US working against it in other countries. The naivete is to believe that the rest of the world will actually subscribe to the US propaganda.
The arrogance was spelled out in 2015 by Ambassador Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis in a publication for the Council on Foreign Relations. In March 2015, they wrote: