Ming China, and its lessons for Trump's trade war

If America wants to be great again, a retreat into isolationism is the worst path to follow. Just look at history.

- David Fickling

From a certain angle, President Donald Trump's tariff blitz looks like nothing so much as a chronic case of China envy.

Look at the losers' list announced from the White House Rose Garden on April 2 in the season finale of this all-too-real reality show: Every sign points towards a desire to Make America China Again - from the obsession with trade deficits to the promise to bring back manufacturing jobs from abroad.

Think of a continent-sized economy with a persistent trade surplus and a booming manufacturing sector, and the most obvious candidate is China, Mr Trump's most consistent bogeyman since he announced his first presidential run nearly a decade ago.

If Mr Trump is borrowing an economic lesson from China, though, it's not the one that drove that country's economic rise over the past 2 1/2 decades.

That episode, after all, followed a sharp reduction in trade barriers and decades of economic reforms to reduce the role of the state and provide a stable investment environment, pretty much the opposite of what you see happening in the United States right now.

Instead, Mr Trump's model could be drawn from an earlier and more demoralising episode: the Ming Dynasty's bans on foreign trade from the 14th century onwards.

Far from making China great again, that isolationist policy paved the way for centuries of decline and eventual humiliation at the hands of foreign powers.

An America that was unable to reverse all the restrictions on commerce imposed during the first Trump term should reflect on how much worse things could get as this ratchet is tightened further.