Keyu Jin: commitment

Transcript context

…All right. So can you talk through the whole saga of the Trump’s tariffs that’s still going on, especially tariffs on China? From your perspective as an economist, to what degree was it justified? To what degree was it effective? To what degree is it bad policy for US, for the west, for the world, also for China? China has been preparing for this for the last five years, and for the return of Trump and for Trump’s maniac trade policies. You’d think that Trump also had five years to prepare for this battle with China. It didn’t show. You can say that the Chinese, at least this time around, have played their hand pretty well when dealing with Trump’s tariff threats and the trade war with a level of calibrated assertiveness. They have really thought through everything very elaborately. And look, this is not good for either country. Let’s just be clear. It’s bad for US and China and it’s bad for the world. And every country has a stake in the US-China trade war because whether you trade directly or indirectly with China, you’re going to be affected. They are one of the largest intermediate exporters in the world. And Chinese manufacturing goods anchor global manufacturing prices. The cumulative tariff burdens, when you get to Canada, when you get to Mexico, when you get to any other final destination, these tariffs will affect you. So it’s clearly very, very bad for the world. China’s core principles, and I think that this is not well understood from the rest of the world towards the US, and something that they have kept up is equivalence, reciprocity and realism. China’s not going to lower tariffs unless the US does. You kind of stand up to Trump like a man. That’s the only way to deal with Trump. That’s its view. The deal has to be realistic. The phase one deal of the last time wasn’t realistic, and China thinks, look, the US is going to use this as a leverage, right? That’s not possible. This can’t be seen as political concession. The deal has to be seen as mutual commerce. So where China can have room to negotiate is opening up things like services. American banks, American financial institutions have a lot of business to do in China. They can buy a limited number of more goods. They can discuss about transparency around rules and regulations on e-commerce, on data. All of that is fine. But don’t confound economic issues with political issues. Hong Kong, Taiwan is not part of the deal, by the way, in case anyone was wondering. Trying to change China’s state hybrid private sector model, don’t go there. Anything that challenges China’s technology, security, that’s not really part of the discussion. I think that people have to be clear about also what China thinks and wants, and also the Chinese to be clear about what Trump wants, although I don’t know anybody, even Trump himself knows exactly what he wants, in order for these very complex negotiations to actually succeed. Okay, so China has a few red lines, so don’t mention Hong Kong or Taiwan.…

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