First, approach the issue with a sense of urgency it deserves. Promptly begin to diversify Chinese exports away from U.S. markets, and strongly step up purchases of American goods and services to quickly stop and markedly reverse the trend of China’s growing bilateral trade surpluses.
Second, with such a sincere show of good faith, Beijing should adopt regulatory changes offering internationally comparable guarantees for the protection of intellectual property and prohibition of forced technology transfers to Chinese joint-venture partners. China’s apparently large panoply of non-tariff barriers to trade should also be dismantled.
The vigilant members of the China-based American and international chambers of commerce, and the World Trade Organization, will serve as keen observers that China is properly implementing and enforcing its trade regulations.
Third, China can benefit from an enhanced International Monetary Fund surveillance, technically called Article IV consultations. That would make sure that China’s monetary, fiscal and structural economic policies — which include both domestic and foreign trade — are fully in compliance with international rules and best practice policies.
In addition to that, China may also wish to engage in extensive biannual economic examinations with the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development to get an independent expert assessment of the entire spectrum of its economic policies. That’s what the OECD does well, and that could be a very useful source of unbiased advice. Such examinations would also shield China from widely publicized amateurish attacks on its economic management.
Fourth, the IMF consultations and the OECD’s biannual examinations would provide unimpeachable expert opinions on China’s monetary policies and its managed floating exchange rate. That would preserve China’s monetary sovereignty and offer much-needed advice about the country’s highly sensitive capital account transactions.
How China frames those steps within the ongoing trade negotiations with the United States is a matter of its own judgment.
But one thing should be clear: Dragging on the negotiating process while continuing to accumulate China’s huge surpluses on American trades is over. Washington has finally come to the point where it can no longer tolerate inconclusive talk fests while China laughs all the way to the bank.
To be sure, though, getting the trade surplus issue out of the way will not radically improve the U.S.-China relations. That’s impossible as long as America’s security experts consider China a “strategic competitor” and “a revisionist power” determined to challenge America’s world order.
One could expect, however, that a meaningful progress on bilateral trade problems could open more space to address acute security issues in a constructive manner, although, again, there is no guarantee for such an outcome. China’s contested maritime borders, Korean problems and Beijing’s Belt and Road transactions will remain America’s war and peace issues for the foreseeable future.
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