中美贸易再创新高，“脱钩”政策为什么“管”不住美国消费者？

First, economic exchanges between China and the US are the natural choice of US companies and its people. David Dollar, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, recently stated that trade between the US and China is "based on economic efficiency" and a "draconian decoupling" will have a big negative effect on US living standards. The 2022 American Business in China White Paper released by AmCham China stated that 83 percent of its member companies report that they were not considering relocating manufacturing or sourcing outside of China. About 200 US companies took part in the 2022 China International Import Expo in November. Facing pressure from the US government to "decouple" from China, some US companies have adopted a business strategy known as "China Plus One", which shows that economic cooperation between the two nations is still a major trend determined by market rules.

Second, it is difficult for the US to establish a new economic system that excludes China. China is not a "factory" for low value-added products or an assembly plant, but an industrial economy with relatively complete industrial chains, sound infrastructure and modern management and innovation mechanisms. Its position in the global industrial chain is unique and hard to replace. China has developed extensive trading relations and cooperation with countries around the world. Although some anti-China politicians have advocated boycotting Chinese products, the manufacturing and processing of products these countries import from nations outsides China often involve the participation of Chinese companies. From the perspective of a third country, economic and trade exchanges with China are in their own interests. Most countries in the world do not want a few politicians to provoke ideological confrontations forcing them to pick sides in the economic field.

Third, from a fundamental point of view, trade between China and the US grew because the two economies are relatively stable and offer sufficient production capacity and consumer demand. For example, China's GDP grew by 3 percent year-on-year in 2022 to about $18 trillion, despite the challenges from the lingering pandemic and extreme climate events. Although a few countries are attempting to interfere with the development of other countries through their beggar-thy-neighbor economic policies and reap benefits by stirring up tensions in various regions, such attempts will eventually backfire under the highly interconnected global economic system.

Although some Western politicians have brought a Cold War-style zero-sum mentality into China-US economic relations, the two major economies are closely linked, and both sides will benefit from cooperation and lose from division. The strong performance of bilateral trade in 2021 and 2022 showed that despite the intention of a few politicians to portray the international situation as life-and-death competition, the US society wants to cooperate with China. Washington should not see cooperation as a pretext for competition and confrontation. Instead, it should take economic cooperation as the foundation to effectively expand and deepen the scope of cooperation, and formulate a responsible China policy that accommodates the willingness from the US society to cooperate with China.