Our Trade With China Has Helped Americans

Tens of millions of U.S. households gained from lower prices for shoes, clothing and other household necessities

Letter to The WSJ. 

"In his review of “Red Dawn Over China,” (“A Maoist Myth Debunked,” Books, Feb. 14), Tunku Varadarajan asserts that China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 had “devastating consequences for every economy except China’s own. (Thank you, Bill Clinton.)” The facts say otherwise.

It’s true that the U.S. economy shed a net five million manufacturing jobs in the years that followed, but even the “China shock” analysis attributes only one million of those to expanding trade with China. Most of the rest were lost due to automation and productivity gains. Meanwhile, tens of millions of U.S. households gained from lower prices for shoes, clothing and other household necessities. The painful recessions of 2001-02 and 2008-09 were homegrown.

If Congress had rejected the accession protocol negotiated by the Clinton administration in 2000, China would likely have joined the WTO anyway, but U.S. companies would have lost out on the increased market access it required. From 2001 to 2017, before the Trump trade wars began, the average duty China applied to goods imported from the U.S. dropped from 25% to 7%. U.S. exports to China during that time grew eight-fold and sales by U.S. majority-owned affiliates in China soared more than 10-fold—totaling more than $500 billion annually.

Trade with China has been tough on certain U.S. companies, but for most Americans—including farmers, high-tech exporters and consumers—the consequences have been positive.

Daniel Griswold" (retired from Mercatus)