White House chief strategist Steve Bannon Credit:AP Trump often points to the United States' $US310 billion trade deficit with China last year as the ultimate sign of a "bad deal." But that's not the real problem. The deficit is happening mainly because Americans are shoppers, not savers. People in US buy too much stuff. The real issue is the Chinese are pirating American ideas and technologies. In the 1990s and early 2000s, people were worried about China illegally copying movies, music and books. The stakes are a lot higher now as the world's top economies compete on groundbreaking technologies in cloud computing, robotics, artificial intelligence and gene editing. Whoever controls these technologies will dominate global business -- and more. "When historians look back at this period of history, they are not going to wonder why the Chinese were stealing US intellectual property or business practices, they are going to wonder why the US didn't defend itself," says Gordon Chang, an expert on the Chinese economy and author of The Coming Collapse of China. He thinks Bannon is wise to hit China now. The Communist Party of China is gathering for its big conference this northern fall that happens only once every five years. President Xi Jinping has a lot to lose if tensions flare with the United States Since the 1990s, the mantra in corporate America and the White House has been that America needs to cozy up to China. CEOs were salivating at getting access to the largest market on the planet: 1.4 billion Chinese. But it hasn't panned out. China has deftly put up barrier after barrier to make it hard for American companies to sell in China. In the meantime, Chinese firms have profited and are now buying up American companies -- everything from W Hotels to Silicon Valley startups. A Pentagon report this spring warned that China is pumping billions into hot Silicon Valley companies that are working on cutting-edge military equipment.

Steve Bannon, chief White House strategist, says the US is "at economic war with China". Credit:AP "China is limiting market access for US companies in China, yet the Chinese wanted unfettered access to America," says Evan Medeiros, an Asian strategist at the Eurasia Group who served as President Barack Obama's top adviser on the Asia-Pacific region. "We need to re-think China's very substantial access to investment in the US" Bannon has a battle plan ready, and he's already unleashing it. On Monday, the Trump administration launched an investigation into whether China is hijacking American business ideas under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act. At the moment, China forces US companies doing business there to "share" their technology because they have to do a joint venture in order to operate in China. The Section 301 move is in its early stages -- an initial fact finding phase - but Bannon made it clear he plans to push this along. "We're going to run the tables on these guys," he said in the interview. And he is prepared to do even more. He also mentioned bringing a lot more complaints against China for steel and aluminium dumping. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently threatened to slap massive tariffs as high as 45 per cent on goods coming from China to the United States. CEOs hated the idea. It would raise costs on American consumers, they argued. Bannon isn't going that far. Instead, he's targeting his actions to go after the deeper IP issues and how China subsidises many of its companies to give them a leg up against foreign competition. It would be a real wake up call to the Chinese, experts say.

"We're looking at the most serious US trade action against China probably ever since China opened up," says Derek Scissors, a China scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute who helped advise the Trump Administration on the recent Section 301 move. Scissors has been calling for years for Chinese firms that have stolen US intellectual property to be banned from doing business in the United States. Bannon's right to take the China threat seriously, but he's also been pushing policies that would be hugely detrimental to America's competition with China. First and foremost: Immigration, the process by which America attracts the people who come up with so many of the great ideas that America has and China wants. Trump's recent proposal to cut legal immigration in half and his failure to fully condemn the actions of white supremacist groups this weekend are being read around the world as a "You're not welcome here" sign. That's not going to help America win the global talent wars. Whether Bannon can put his ideas into practice is another question, as there are vested interests in at least parts of the status quo. The biggest obstacle Bannon faces in his quest to go after China is what he calls the "Wall Street lobby." Trump's top economic advisers - Gary Cohn at the National Economic Council and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin - are former Goldman Sachs executives who don't want a trade war with China or anybody else. Scissors saw the tensions first-hand. He described a lot of "flipping around" on what to do. Former Obama administration staffers like Harris and Medeiros saw similar tensions play out in their time. They say the business community talks out of both sides of its mouth on China. CEOs complain that the Chinese government is restricting business opportunities, but when the US government prepares to act, CEOs warn of a "parade of horribles" that could happen like trade wars and even a recession. Harris thinks it's overblown.

"I'm actually skeptical that China will retaliate, especially ahead of the party congress this year," she says. The business community made the same huff and puff before the US put sanctions on Russia. "We all woke up the next day and European banks didn't fail and the stock market continued to go gangbusters." Loading Bannon just might be able to get Trump to do what the Bush and Obama administration failed at on China. That is, if he can stay in the White House long enough to make it happen. Washington Post