Aaron Friedberg writes in Foreign Affairs about a tool for keeping communist China at bay.
Twenty-five years after the beginning of the first so-called China shock, when a surge in Chinese exports disrupted manufacturing and industrial sectors worldwide, Beijing has again begun to flood global markets with a wave of heavily subsidized manufactured goods and materials—including everything from metals and textiles to more cutting-edge products such as electric vehicles, lithium batteries, and semiconductors. …
… But it is a mistake to presume that Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) think about the Chinese economy the same way Western economists do. The key to understanding Xi’s economic policies is to recognize that they are principally about power, not prosperity. He will almost certainly forge ahead toward concentrating the world’s industrial power within China, even at the risk of provoking a cataclysmic trade conflict with other countries.
The emergence of a shared challenge has created an opportunity for enhanced cooperation among the advanced industrial democracies of the West and less developed countries in the global South. Beijing will push back hard against any attempt at policy coordination, seeking to divide, isolate, and overwhelm those who try to stand in its way. But the problems posed by the intensification of Chinese mercantilism are now so great that they cannot be addressed in an enduring way by any one country. Nor can they be solved merely by applying the usual assortment of stopgap remedies.
Only by banding together in a trade defense coalition—an idea I developed with an economist in Asia—can countries with market-based economies protect themselves against China’s predatory practices. Leading this effort will require the United States and its allies to set aside the post–Cold War dream of building a fully integrated, maximally efficient global economy. But rather than abandon the liberal principles that underpinned the free-trade vision, they must focus on constructing a core subsystem of countries that are genuinely committed to the concepts of openness, fairness, and reciprocity and are willing to defend and abide by them.
