THE REAL THREAT IS AN ISOLATED CHINA

DECOUPLING FROM TRADE WILL MAKE THE U.S. POORER AND CHINA MORE TOTALITARIAN.

- JOHAN NORBERG

IN A BITTERLY polarized era, China bashing is still bipartisan. President Donald Trump opens with tariffs, the Democrats call and raise, and then it’s Trump’s turn to up the ante again. The People’s Republic is now almost universally seen both as an economic rival that has ravaged the American economy and as a military rival that threatens American allies and world peace.

It is certainly reasonable to be suspicious of the Chinese Communist Party. Its recent trajectory is dispiriting: Where many of us hoped economic liberalization would produce political liberalization, an authoritarian backlash instead started clamping down on both free markets and free speech. The longstanding repression of ethnic minorities and political dissenters was industrialized and digitized.

And while previous Chinese leaders preferred to set aside contested geopolitical issues and leave them to later and wiser generations, today’s wolf warriors have increased military pressure against their neighbors, threatening Taiwan with invasion and other countries with trade coercion.

All the worries about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s despotism were enhanced when he maintained his alliance with Vladimir Putin after the Russian leader’s brutal 2022 attack on Ukraine. Even for a card-carrying free trader, it may now seem reasonable to screen Chinese investments, to keep the most sensitive technologies out of their hands, and to make sure we aren’t too dependent on them for any single resource.

But as a newly emboldened Trump assembles a Cabinet of national security hawks and economic nationalists, we seem to be heading for much more than that. Several of his choices to staff his administration have agitated for decoupling the American and Chinese economies and imposing harsh technology restrictions. And that would not make the situations that worry people about China better. It would make them much, much worse.