WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is dialing up its rhetoric against Chinese trade practices, accusing Beijing in a report released Tuesday of waging a systematic campaign of “economic aggression.”
The release of the paper comes a day after President Donald Trump touched off a new phase of market turmoil by threatening expanded tariffs on Chinese imports. The policy and the document meant to justify it reflect the mounting influence of its chief author, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who has been shaping and encouraging Trump’s most hawkish trade positions since the 2016 campaign.
Titled “How China’s Economic Aggression Threatens the Technologies and Intellectual Property of the United States and the World,” the 65-page report doesn’t suggest any new policies beyond the trade and investment restrictions already announced or under consideration, nor does it break new ground on Chinese trade practices. The study, which includes 300 footnotes and a 30-page appendix, consists of a synthesis of existing public reports examining Chinese economic policies.
But the report intensifies the administration’s bellicose tone toward China and provides a window on the logic framing the internal debates shaping the emerging policies. The report breaks down the Chinese government’s alleged economic aggression into five broad categories, including protecting its home market for domestic producers, securing control of natural resources, and seeking dominance of leading-edge high-tech industries. It then lists more than 50 types of policies — from cybertheft of intellectual property to blocking foreign access to key raw materials available mainly in China — that it accuses the Chinese government of deploying to meet those objectives.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.[1]
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References
- ^ An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com. (www.wsj.com)
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