US must confront China on trade

China’s threat of a “counterstrike” against the Philippines simply shows that it is a bully—and a menace to the Free World.

According to the International Monetary Fund, China will most unfortunately replace the United States by 2016 as the world’s No. 1 economic power. And with its growing cutting-edge technology—the Associated Press reported two weeks ago that China now has the fastest supercomputer in the world—it will in the not-so-distant future become the world’s No. 1 military power.

China had suffered humiliation at the hands of the West in the last century, and payback time is coming.  Tiananmen Square in New York? Chinese tanks in Times Square?  These seem unlikely now.  But the idea that China would soon become the No. 1 economic power of the world also seemed unlikely—nay, absurd—in the 1980s.

Globalization has hastened the massive flow of products from China to the West, and the tectonic shift of wealth and jobs from the latter to the former. Thus, the West is suffering from high unemployment and growing poverty while China is booming.

The best chance for America is to confront China on the issue of unfair trade before the World Trade Organization and such. China’s political system enables it to export shoddy goods produced by exploited laborers, manipulate its currency and subsidize state corporations to undercut foreign rivals. America should pressure these organizations to tweak their rules to compel China to play fair.

If all else fails, the United States should consider setting up tariff walls and mobilizing hundreds of thousands of its unemployed workers to man those walls and collect duties on Chinese goods. After all, the huge US domestic market should be tapped to serve the US national interest. This will halt the one-way traffic of goods from China to the United States and slowly but surely bring US jobs and wealth back home. Yes, there will unavoidably be a spike in domestic US prices. But the alternative will be unthinkably horrible.

Hopefully, President Obama and the other US national leaders will wake up from their deep slumber and take steps on the economic front to protect the Americans, and the rest of the Free World, from the Bully in the North.

—R. TORRALBA,

rrtj_2000@yahoo.com,

Makati City