The ChiCom’s economic success via manufacturing has come with a large cost to the health of the Chinese people and to the environment with choking pollution caused by unrestrained factory emissions. The recent prolonged spell of suffocating smog has shown the severity of the problem.

A few days ago, Beijing issued its first Red Alert of the year for 23 cities and an area roughly the size of the United States. Schools and factories have been shut down. Flights are cancelled because of poor visibility. Half a billion people are affected, and Chinese routinely wear masks in public to filter out the filth they are breathing.

A Chinese citizen recently wrote in the Business Insider that the first time she ever saw blue skies and white clouds was when she arrived in Boston to enter college.

Worse, from our perspective, is that Chinese pollution doesn’t remain in the People’s Republic: it travels on air currents across the Pacific to North America. A 2014 report published in Environmental Science & Technology estimated About 29% of San Francisco’s pollution comes from China.

China’s wind-borne poison is not a new problem. The LA Times pointed out the toxic clouds nearly a decade ago:

Asian air pollution affects our weather, Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2007 Asia’s growing air pollution – billowing plumes of soot, smog and wood smoke – is making the Pacific region cloudier and stormier, disrupting winter weather patterns along the West Coast and into the Arctic, researchers reported Monday. Carried on prevailing winds, the industrial outpouring of dust, sulfur, carbon grit and trace metals from booming Asian economies is having an intercontinental cloud-seeding effect, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. . . .

Interestingly, the Chinese have promised in the past to cut pollution , but their smog is getting worse instead of better.

Americans spend a fortune on environmental protection to keep our air invisible, but that expense is being undermined by the Red Chinese and their filthy manufacturing. American industry is required to minimize the pollution it produces, yet we have a trade deal with the ChiComs that treats them as fair partners, not cheaters and major polluters. This sort of fraudulent “free trade” is part of the reason why Americans elected Donald Trump in November.

So when President Trump renegotiates the trade deal with the People’s Republic of China, he can hit them with a pollution charge rather than a tariff.