LOL..."the assumption that an open world trading system"
You think we had a open trading system with China? xD
The whole point of this is because China has been repeatedly violating trade agreement and has completely unfair trade policy's with the USA. Do you have any idea what it's like for an American to try to do business in China? Any Idea?
Just to give you a few examples...
-American companies cannot operate in China without sharing their technology and have a Chinese company partnership... and even then that privileged can be revoked at any time on a whim with no due process. No foreigner or Foreigner Company has any due process whatsoever, they will lose almost every lawsuit in China, the times where they do not lose is if the government feels their is a net benefit to China.
...
It doesn't end here...
China is CONSTANTLY stealing our technology. They have government funded hackers that CONSTANTLY attack our universities, banks, corporations, whatever on a daily basis looking for technology, research and vulnerabilities. Chinese spies are sent to steal genetic farming and medical research, and they are caught very often. Literally one seed stolen can be billions of dollars down the drain.
It doesn't end there either. I won't even bring up the debt shark practices China does with other countries and how their entire economic strategy is to take down the US economy, not mutually benefit from it.
China has vowed to be able to invade Taiwan by 2020. They have LITERALLY officially said this... And I hope you know of all the other military drama they have been involved in the last decade.... They also support the North Korean regime...
Seriously... How can you justify ANYTHING you are saying?
All of your best arguments are equivalent to a wife who is being beaten half to death every night, but she should not leave him because she will no longer have financial support.
Did you know that GM earns more revenue in China than in the U.S.? I didn't think so.
To be fair, China really is a bad actor in the global economy. In particular, it has pretty much thumbed its nose at international rules on intellectual property rights, grabbing foreign technology without proper payment. Trump officials do sometimes raise the intellectual property issue as a justification for getting tough.
But if getting China to pay what it owes for technology were the goal, you’d expect the U.S. both to make specific demands on that front and to adopt a strategy aimed at inducing China to meet those demands.
In fact, the U.S. has given little indication of what China should do about intellectual property. Meanwhile, if getting better protection of patent rights and so on were the goal, America should be trying to build a coalition with other advanced countries to pressure the Chinese; instead, we’ve been alienating everyone in sight.
Anyway, what seems to really bother Trump aren’t China’s genuine policy sins, but its trade surplus with the United States, which he has repeatedly said is $500 billion a year. (It’s actually less than $340 billion, but who’s counting?) This trade surplus, he insists, means that China is winning -- in effect stealing $500 billion a year from America.
As many economists and economic writers have pointed out, this is junk economics. Except at times of mass unemployment, trade deficits aren’t a subtraction from the economies that run them, nor are trade surpluses an addition to the economies on the other side of the imbalance. Over all, the U.S. trade deficit is just the flip side of the fact that America attracts more inward investment from foreigners than the amount Americans invest abroad. Trade policy has nothing to do with it.
Beyond this conceptual confusion, there’s a raw fact few people -- and, as far as I can tell, nobody in the Trump administration -- seem to appreciate: China no longer runs big trade surpluses.
The U.S. and China's so unbalanced trad is a statistical illusion.
China is the Great Assembler: it’s where components from other countries, like Japan and South Korea, are put together into consumer products for the U.S. market. So a lot of what we import from China is really produced elsewhere.
It’s not clear why we should demand that China stop playing that role. Indeed, it’s not clear that China could even do much to reduce its bilateral surplus with the U.S.: To do so, it would basically have to have a completely different economy. And this just isn’t going to happen unless we have a full-blown trade war that shuts down much of the global economy as we know it -- and that would be bad for everyone.