US should take a long, hard look in the mirror rather than blaming China
By Xiang Yi,
People’s Daily
"Fixating
on scapegoats is apparently much easier than taking a long, hard look in the
mirror," said Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at
Yale University's Jackson Institute of Global Affairs in an article he recently
published.
Roach
also pointed out that the US chattering class has it all wrong and the China
bashing is more an outgrowth of domestic problems than a response to a genuine
external threat, and Washington has been loose with facts, analysis, and
conclusions.
In 2016, the Foreign Affairs
Magazine of the US called the trade war a "scapegoat". The real
problem for the US "trade anxiety" is "diminished domestic
opportunity and social mobility". Besides, "the economic ladder that
allowed previous generations of low-skilled Americans to reach the middle class
is broken."
Washington
should focus on actually fixing its domestic problems instead of searching for
external enemies to blame them on, said Maksim Oreshkin, Russian Minister for
Economic Development.
As Oreshkin sees, the US provoked
trade dispute to establish an imaginary overseas enemy , but the real enemy is
the long-standing structural issues of its own economic policies.
As the US government accuses
other countries of stealing its domestic job opportunities through "unfair
trade", China has become a main target of blame for being the largest
source of trade deficit of the US.
However, facts speak louder than
words. According to data from the United Nations, China-US trade volume
increased 4.4 times from 2001 to 2017, and the US unemployment rate dropped
from 5.7 percent to 4.1 percent in the same period.
The US has seen a rapid growth of
imports from China and a steady decline of unemployment rate especially since
2009, which indicated the collapse of the US accusation on the substitute relation
between commodity imports and unemployment.
On the contrary, as the US
manufacturing increased its imports from China by 32.4 percent in general from
2010 to 2015, the relevant job opportunities grew by 6.8 percent, according to
a report issued by the Congressional Research Service in two years ago.
The above figures have just
proved what Stephen
Roach said – “An
insecure US is afflicted with macroeconomic imbalances of its own making and
fearful of the consequences of its own retreat from global leadership."
Over the recent years, the US has
issued a series of documents that targeted China as a strategic competitor,
including the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, and the
Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China.
Such move exposed the anxiety of the US strategy-wise.
The US in the past months has been
abusing national power to exert unreasonable pressure on Chinese technology
companies including Huawei, and slowing the approvals for Chinese staff
applying for senior engineer jobs at US semiconductor companies. The approval
that used to be finished within only a few weeks now takes as long as six to
eight months.
The US, showing hegemony to other
countries, is also exposing its insecurity and lack of confidence to the
fullest. Even the US public believes it won’t help at all for the US to seek
"imaginary enemies".
Diverting domestic contradictions
by blaming other countries is like a sick man forcing other healthy people to
take medication. Such absurd action will only make the US a "trouble
maker" in the international community rather than leading to any remedy.
During the trade dispute with
China, the US leaders failed to create any new job for the country but placed
heavier burdens on the world economy, said German magazine Der Spiegel in a
recent article.
The Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development has also cut its growth expectations for the world
economy because it believes trade tensions have already slowed global growth,
and will keep threatening future investment and growth.
There is no such thing to ask
others to pay for one's own mistakes. Instead of blaming others, the US should
take a long, hard look in the mirror of itself. Its unilateral actions will
only tarnish its own reputation and burn its own bridges.
US should take a long, hard look in the mirror rather than blaming China
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