When Country A has a trade deficit with Country B, it is not necessarily because B's market is closed. A can reduce its deficit by not buying from B. It can be because A has overconsumption or buying more than it can pay, and B has not much to buy from A. Perhaps Japan has deficits with countries in the Middle East, buying a lot of oil; but it cannot afford to stop buying oil from them. In the case of the US deficits. I think overconsumption is the biggest cause. Americans could counter this argument by saying that its overconsuption is providing the world with means of exchange.



It is difficult to always live up to one's moral principle (free trade, if free trade is moral goodness) and be virtuous. One way out from this psychological trouble is to find wickedness that does not exist in others. As a Harvard professor said, Americans voluntarily twisted the Japanese arms and the Japanese voluntarily reduced its exports to the United States; Japan was a culprit voluntarily betraying the moral principle of free trade but everyone lived happily ever after. (This American moral virtuousness is very old. Japan wanted to avoid military confrontation in the Pacific in 1941. I will appreciate very much if you read my (Michi's) comments, one Hamilton Fish/FDR, the other side of the coin: How we were deceived into World War II and Charles Beard/President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: Appearances and Realities, amazon usa. Japan should be absolved from the crime it did not commit; more than seventy years have passed.)



Until around 1968 Japan had chronical deficits with America. Washington replied that a bilateral deficit or surplus did not matter because trade was multilateral. But it changed its logic in the 1970s or 80s and began to always say the Japanese market was closed. The fact was that Japan was doing trade according to the rules of IMF and OECD. Its market was as open as any other developed country already in the 1980s. Amerian finacial oligarchs had a greedy eye on Japanese massive savings, wanting to steal of them without working sweats on the foreheads but manipulating computors in air-conditioned rooms.



The concept of free trade has a lot of problems because, as Prof. Dani Rodrik said in The Globalization Paradox, each nation being cutlurally different has things to protect and things to promote.



I do not like the CCP's politics and its foreign policy; I do not like the way it regulates and puts society and people under strict and unhumanitarian surveillance. But Chinese society has been historically such that unless strictly and vigorously watched it is at the serious risk of disintegration and anarchy; the renminbi as an important means of social regulation would never be liberalized. The renminbi regulation also serves to prevent Chinese wealth from seeping out of the country.



But talking about our own society, liberalization has gone very much far in almost every aspect of society and I feel people may be in subconscious angst.