由 jpichiban 
面對中國的經濟和國家安全威脅，美國需要制定新的戰略，而特朗普的「美國優先」政策並不能解決問題。賀錦麗承諾加強美國的全球領導地位，這為她提供了一個更好的機會來應對中國。普林斯頓大學教授亞倫·弗里德伯格提出建立一個貿易保護聯盟，以應對中國的重商主義政策。該聯盟將由美國、歐盟和其他民主國家組成，共同對來自中國的產品徵收統一關稅，並限制中國的影響力。雖然此舉可能違反世界貿易組織規則，但弗里德伯格認為中國已經扭曲了該組織的規則。專家們認為，建立這樣的聯盟是必要的，因為美國單獨無法應對中國，而賀錦麗比特朗普更適合領導這樣的聯盟。儘管聯盟可能面臨挑戰，但賀錦麗在11月獲勝後，將有機會證明其有效性。
Original Title: How Kamala Harris Should Deal With China
Summary: The United States needs a strategy to address China’s economic and national security threat, and Trump’s loud “America First” approach won’t work. Kamala Harris has a better shot because she believes in the power of alliances. In her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, the vice president pledged to make sure “America, not China, wins the competition of the 21st century.” In the same breath, she hinted at how she intends to do it. She promised “to strengthen, not abandon, our global leadership.” Trump’s go-it-alone approach won’t work because the United States doesn’t have the power to take on China alone. There’s a better way. I read an important article about this in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs, by Aaron Friedberg, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. The piece is titled “Stopping the Next China Shock: A Collective Strategy to Counter Beijing’s Mercantilism.” Here’s the problem, Friedberg writes. After China’s export surge disrupted global trade for 25 years, Beijing is again flooding the world with “heavily subsidized manufactured goods and raw materials.” Beijing has two goals. One is to keep its people employed in the face of weak domestic demand. The other is to position China to become “the world’s most productive, innovative, and powerful nation.” For years, Western economists and diplomats argued that China could achieve a win-win outcome by consuming more of what it produced, rather than exporting so much. Boosting domestic consumption — and thus narrowing the trade surplus — would raise living standards for the Chinese people while reducing pressure on workers in foreign factories. But President Xi Jinping is not inclined to follow the advice of these economists and diplomats, Friedberg writes. To understand China’s leaders, it’s best to think of them as “mercantilist Leninists, whose first priority is to acquire and wield political power,” he writes. Making ordinary Chinese people wealthy is not part of the plan. Making other countries dependent on China for essential goods, on the other hand, clearly is. So here’s Friedberg’s solution. “Only by joining together in a trade-defense coalition — an idea I’ve bounced off an economist in Asia — can market economies protect themselves from China’s predatory practices,” he writes. (He declined to name the economist who helped him shape the idea or to explain why.) Forming such a coalition would require abandoning the free-trade dream of unrestricted commerce among nations and relying instead on a “core subsystem of countries” — China would not be included — “that are genuinely committed to the concepts of openness, fairness, and reciprocity and that are willing to defend and uphold those concepts.” According to Friedberg, the trade-defense coalition would need to include the United States, the European Union, “most likely” Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Argentina and Indonesia might also be potential candidates, “along with any other country that seeks to industrialize independently of China to protect its economy or military security.” Members would agree on uniform tariffs on “key products vulnerable to China’s supply dominance.” China might try to circumvent tariffs by shifting some production or assembly to other countries. To prevent this, coalition members would need to become better at detecting Chinese origins and imposing tariffs based on the percentage of Chinese content in a product. This wouldn’t be easy. This open discrimination against Chinese goods would violate World Trade Organization rules. But Friedberg argues that “China has already distorted and bent the WTO’s principles and is now using its procedures to shield its own discriminatory practices from scrutiny and to avoid compliance.” Would it actually work? Coalition members would have to stand together to resist China’s inevitable counterattacks, which would likely be attempts to divide and conquer by offering benefits to those who continue to cooperate with China. At a conference this year hosted by the Princeton Center for International Security Studies, I discussed Friedberg’s ideas with several experts who attended. Alicia Garcia-Herrero, a senior fellow at the Bruegel, a European economics think tank, said that “the U.S. cannot contain China alone without a coalition.” She said Harris would be better at this than Trump for the reasons I’ve described: “You need a government that believes in coming together to solve this.” She said that countries need to act now in case China reaches free trade agreements with some countries, preventing them from joining. Max Zenglein, the chief economist of the Mercator Institute for China Studies, based in Berlin, told me that he largely agreed with Friedberg. But he said that China had become a leader in many technology areas, and coalition members might not be able to access Chinese innovations. (Consider, for example, cheap Chinese electric cars.) He said that it might be better to restrict, rather than ban, imports from China, in order to maintain access to Chinese innovation while also making sure that protected domestic businesses don’t become lazy. I emailed two more experts. Stuart Paterson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, endorsed Friedberg’s coalition idea, mentioning that he wrote a similar argument for the school in 2020. Daniel Rosen, a co-founder of Rhodium Group, which does China-focused research, wrote that a coalition similar to Friedberg’s proposal is “a key component of the balancing coalition necessary to reduce market democracies’ dependence on authoritarian economies.” He shared with me a report he sent to clients in which he wrote, “In my view, there’s no question that Beijing strategically looks forward to a second Trump term, rather than a first Harris term.” In that client report, Rosen wrote, “The Harris team will refine some of President Biden’s policies that solidified U.S. alliances, ‘but they understand the strategic leap that has already been made.’” By contrast, “Trump, ignoring his own capable national security advisors’ recommendations to protect U.S. allies, would continue to undermine America’s global partnerships in a second term,” Rosen wrote. “Such unilateral withdrawal from competition would be extremely valuable for Beijing. Incomparably valuable.” One potential counterargument against Friedberg’s trade-defense coalition is that it would be overkill — it would unnecessarily provoke China, increasing the risk that trade war might escalate into a shooting war, or at least depriving the world of the benefits of cross-border trade and investment. Another is that it would simply not work: Coalition members would squabble and defect. And countries outside China and its orbit might not have the stomach, patience or skills to rebuild strategic industries that have long been lost. The “overkill” argument has become less persuasive in recent years, as Xi has shown he’s not interested in allaying Western concerns. The “won’t work” argument is harder to counter. If Harris wins in November and takes the trade-defense coalition route, she’ll have a chance to prove the doubters wrong.
Original article: https://cn.nytimes.com/opinion/20240827/kamala-harris-china/zh-hant/?utm_source=RSS