“His (Trump’s) taking on China for its flagrant violation of the trade and intellectual property rights has given courage to Europe and Japan to chime in the American challenge on China’s practices. The challenge will spread as Trump succeeds further in controlling China’s behavior, and that will benefit the whole world”, says the author.     

The implementation of China’s 75-year long project known as the “Great Trilogy of 21^stCentury”that aims to erase the humiliating defeat China suffered at the hands of the British during the Anglo-Chinese trade wars or the Opium Wars of the 19^thCentury and bring back its glorious past by taking the sole control of the world leadership. It started in 1978 and is to be completed by 2052. The strategy to achieve this populous goal involves benefiting from the laissez-faire policy of the free-market economies, particularly the USA and the countries in the Western Europe. Consequently, China decided to sell in these countries all types of products and services by applying predatory pricing policy with the goal to turn these countries into china’s captive markets.

China devised policy to conduct its foreign trade as means to provide cash to fund its ambitious goal to displace the USA as the global leader. It has continued to build its cash reserves by selling but not buying or buying very little. To subvert the nations’ ability to export to China, it wrote or rewrote its laws and regulations more than 10,000 times a year, more that the rest of the world combined. The purpose has been to keep out competitive imports of any kind to preserve its huge cash reserves built by trade surpluses. While it worked to indigenize all products, services, processes, and technologies, it also worked to bring Chinese culture back to its past. This included displacing Buddha with Confucius by using the “Da Tong” that teaches achieving deals in the world with harmony.

Since America is the world’s largest, freest market, China had larger designs to take over the US markets. It used its United Nations Security Council (UNSC) veto power as a strategy to achieve this goal. It used the veto power to negotiate the opening up of American import of goods from China whether it were apparels, consumer electronics, or whatever else. When so ever America got in conflict at any place in the world and went to the UNSC for its nod, China agreed to abstain from exercising its veto power against America for easing of Chinese imports into the USA. Also, this is how it made America have it become a member of the World Trade Organization and lift limits on import of apparel and other consumer goods that were supplied by many other smaller countries. In due course, it routed out other countries that competed against it in American market and turned America into China’s monopolistic market. Everything selling in the USA carried the China label.

To maintain hefty cash reserves for its Great Trilogy of 21^stCentury goal, globally, China imported one-dollar worth of goods for each five dollars of exports it made. This behavior became apparent in 2009 when it tremendously cut back on its imports to preserve its foreign cash reserves when its exports to some countries went down after the 2008-09 recession.

In 2012, when the world was still going through an extended period of what was dubbed as “the greatest recession since the great depression”, China entered the global markets in a big strategic way with the cash it had preserved through the lopsided foreign trade. It started taking control of land and strategic natural resources and assets from mismanaged countries in Africa and Asia, and even in Europe by straightforward acquisition where possible or long-term leases. It started to build passageways to control its flow through the globe, building ports and strategic bases for monitoring and controlling global activities through international waters and to enhance the speed of its own movements along all continents. It started to claim its rights and, in some cases, forcibly take possession of lands based on its centuries, or in some cases millennia old dubious records.

American presidents from the early seventies, starting with President Richard Nixon slowly but steadily, for one reason or another, gave in to China. This went on unchecked until President Bill Clinton. President George W. Bush, who had a strategy to reduce America’s dependence on China and get closer to India and other democratic countries, gave up on it after 9/11 as he decided to fight the Islamic terrorism for which he needed China’s support in the United Nations. President Barack Obama, as a candidate, had huge plans to confront China on its trade practices, the stealing of America’s intellectual property and constantly hacking into American business and government installations. After his election, in November 2009, during his first visit to China, he brought along plans to ask China to address its huge trade surplus with America and to open its markets to the USA to plug it. Instead, he was harangued by the Chinese President Hu Jintao on free trade. The meeting was so embarrassing for Obama that he did not have the courage to check on China for its trade imbalance, the stealing of intellectual property or the cyber hacking during any of his meetings with the Chinese for all of his eight years in the White House. He was afraid that China would carry forward its threat to withdraw its deposits at the US Treasury and cause a monetary havoc. Obama with the desire not to unravel the economy, kept low and China became bolder.

No American president dared challenge China until President Donald Trump came in the White House. It is not just that Trump is bold to handle simultaneously problems along several fronts in the world but is smart and efficient to negotiate to get what is good for America. His taking on China for its flagrant violation of the trade and intellectual property rights has given courage to Europe and Japan to chime in the American challenge on China’s practices. The challenge will spread as Trump succeeds further in controlling China’s behavior, and that will benefit the whole world.

(The author is Business Professor at Seton Hall University.  He can be reached at AD.Amar@shu.edu)