China Responds to the United States
Written by Alfonso Elizondo
According to the brilliant BBC News correspondent, Karishma Vaswari, on Monday, September 24, the US started to apply new import tariffs of 10% on about 6,000 new Chinese goods, amounting to some 200 billion US dollars. On this list are textiles and handbags that represent little more than half of China’s total sales to the US. China’s immediate response was to apply tariffs of 5 to 10% on US goods with a total value of 60 billion US dollars.
One of the Chinese companies most affected by the new US tariffs was the huge steel pipe factory, Hebel Huayang Steel Pipe (HHSP), in Hebei Province that had already stated that it would not sell any more steel pipes to the US and had started looking for other customers before the announcement of the new round of tariffs on Chinese goods. So now it has many other alternatives.
The HHSP plant manager told the BBC’s Karishma Vasawari that the US market was only a small percentage of their production and that he was not the least bit worried about the US tariffs. He also said that China would respond appropriately to this tariff attack and that the Chinese would surely show their power. The manager of HHSP thinks that the trade war will hurt the US much more than China since it has many companies and investments in China and that would have a great impact on them, not only those operating in China, but also those that operate in the US and in other countries around the world.
Karishma Vaswari says that the HHSP manager has the ability to keep all things under his control for a long time, a situation that does not happen in the case of the US. Meanwhile, Wong Haryou of the Center for China and Globalization believes that the United States has obtained great benefits in their country anyway, since many US companies are based in China and have large commercial operations with that country. There are some in China that are even bigger than those in the US, so he suggests that if the US is not satisfied it should go to the WTO (World Trade Organization) in Geneva and file its complaint.
According to the American Chamber of Commerce, China needs to be more transparent and honest about its market. At the same time, the Chamber of Commerce in China said that their country was stuck in a ‘reforms deficit’ and that the trade war with the US was due to the ‘incomplete opening of the Chinese market’.
Despite these different points of view, some American elites believe that China has stolen the experience needed to be able to modernize itself, violating the intellectual property rights of the US. So Kinpo, the Taiwan electronics giant is benefiting from the war between China and the United States.
The Global Times says Washington is swollen with pride in the areas of politics and culture, and has misinterpreted the history of human development.
Addendum: The only apparent conclusion about the global effects of this complicated trade war is that there is no country in the world and not even a particular group or person, that can come out winning, since that misanthropic, violent and individualistic behavior has forever been what has predominated in human society.