News

China’s trade manipulations will devastate us—it’s time to fight back

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)

September 19, 2024

New York Post

Industries reel, companies crumble, and factories close their doors for good…. This could be a description of the original “China Shock”…. But it also describes what countries across the globe are facing right now: a massive glut of vital industrial inputs and high-value goods, courtesy of Chinese overproduction.

Just look at Latin America, where a sudden inundation of Chinese imports has…driven Chile’s sole remaining steel mill out of business. Look at Asia, where India and Vietnam are investigating a variety of market disruptions. Or look at Europe, where…Chinese-made automobiles have seized a third of the EU’s electric vehicle market in less than five years….

And yet, across the globe, elites invested in the economic status quo are determined to… do nothing. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez are examples. Their nations’ auto industries rake in short-term profits from car sales in China and Chinese investments in their own EV companies…. To no one’s surprise, they are actively undermining EU plans to hike tariffs on Chinese-made EVs.

Another example comes from the International Monetary Fund…. IMF economists are diverting blame from Beijing’s industrial policies to “macro forces” due to the COVID-19 pandemic—while chastising the United States for defending domestic production. Why? Simply put, the institution is biased by Beijing’s membership, and its economists are blinded by their free-trade fundamentalist training.

The truth is that Chinese overproduction is far from accidental: The Chinese Communist Party laid out its plan to dominate global trade in vital industrial inputs and high-value goods almost 10 years ago…. Now, as my office’s latest research demonstrates, Beijing has near-total control over the supply chains of industries that will define the 21^st century…. The CCP is already flexing this power with new restrictions on antimony, a metal that’s crucial to the production of many military supplies….

All this is only a taste of what China’s supply-chain dominance can do. To secure our economic independence, we must challenge that dominance…. Other countries must do the same. The evidence shows that “free trade” with China is a one-way ticket to broken industries, bankrupt businesses, and widespread unemployment—as well as to security dependence on a power-hungry dictatorship….

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