“1 big thing: China—too big to stop,” announced Axios, fresh from Davos, last weekend. It is indeed a big thing that China is big. It’s one reason Donald Trump showed up at Davos and lauded something else big—one of the “biggest trade deals ever made,” he said—namely the “Economic and Trade Agreement Between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China: Phase One.” Often described as a truce in the trade war, phase one doesn’t resolve the thorniest disputes, such as those over industrial subsidies by Beijing, but it includes language about intellectual property protections and sets up a new dispute-resolution process. Overall the biggest effect of this agreement appears to be that China has committed to buying hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. goods, to offset our trade imbalance. That may be for the best, if the goal is to have a tight economic bond to Beijing. But how much do we want—or need—that bond at all? Even as we grow more nervous about China’s intentions and capabilities—and our focus for the moment shifts to the specter of a coronavirus pandemic originating in Wuhan—this agreement leaves us with that question.

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The relationship between the United States and China, even before the communist takeover in 1949, has always been conflicted, characterized on both sides by both affection and suspicion. I lived in Beijing for a year in the 1990s in my college years and, appreciating how much day-to-day life had improved since the days of Mao Zedong, came home a cheerleader for China’s development and prosperity. Like many people then, I bought into a theory that China, as it grew richer, would liberalize in the political sphere, strengthening the rule of law and introducing gradual reforms. So confident were many Americans of the growing obsolescence of the Chinese Communist Party that, until about 15 years ago, it was still hard to get U.S. journalists and editors to conceive of any story about China in terms other than longevity of its regime. In 1993, just four years after the killings in Tiananmen Square, Nicholas Kristof was laying out a vision of “prosperous quasi-democracy” developing in China over the following decade, spurred on by “rapid-fire economic development and more measured political liberalization.” China was going to join the ranks of Taiwan and South Korea.

In the 1990s, everyone seemed to be a free trader, and dissenters like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan drew scorn from respectable circles. The only question was whether the United States would seize on the opportunity to get in on the markets of developing countries as they made their way toward South Korean levels of prosperity. As Bill Clinton would say in 2000, when pushing for a bill that would grant China “permanent normal trade relations,” or PNTR, if we missed this opportunity, it would “cost America jobs as our competitors in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere capture Chinese markets that we otherwise would have served.” As for human rights, “We can work to pull China in the right direction or we can turn our backs and almost certainly push it in the wrong direction.” It would also be good for American workers, because “we’ll be able to export products without exporting jobs.” At a time when the U.S. economy had been growing at an exceptional pace, with dotcom start-ups blanketing the landscape, this all seemed plausible. China could grow wealthier manufacturing tube socks, while the United States could explore the frontiers of innovation.

But people and history have a nasty habit of disrupting our theories about them. China wanted to make more than socks, and, even when it was making products of that sort, it was burying the competition. I began to get the inkling that a Chinese factory wasn’t just a U.S. factory with lower pay when, in the early 2000s, I had to visit a lot of production facilities around the world. My job was to check on labor conditions in these places and report back to American companies that had placed orders with them. I was going to lots of countries—Mexico, Belgium, Thailand, Syria, Italy, Tunisia, to name just some—but China dominated the action. After gaining permanent normal trade relations with the United States in 2000 and accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, the People’s Republic was seeing a rush of U.S. investment.

The factories in China were harsh. Many employed thousands of workers, most of them young women from the countryside, who worked in demanding production lines and had unsmiling, frightened expressions. In places that used varnishes or glues, ventilation was often scant. Among piece-rate metal workers, protective gear, if any was provided, often got tossed aside as an impediment to productivity. Employees ate from the company kitchen, paying for the board, and slept in company dormitories, paying for the lodging. A typical room might house 12 people in six bunk beds on a concrete floor. Most workers would put up a curtain in their individual bunks, to have a little privacy. Bathing would be done with towels and handheld basins of cold water. Sunday was a day of rest, except at crunch time, when workers were on call all days of the week. Typical shifts ran between 12 and 15 hours. They earned a few dollars a day. No U.S. factory could compete with this. A steady trickle of blue-collar job loss in the United States became a flood.

Today, we can see that few of the consensus prophecies about trading with China proved to be true. By 2005, our trade deficit with China had doubled since Bill Clinton made his speech. By 2014, it had quadrupled. By 2018, it had increased five-fold, exceeding $400 billion, and China has developed a reputation for vices like currency manipulation and economic espionage. By that time, Xi Jinping was cementing himself in power and overseeing an intensity of surveillance over Chinese citizens that made the early 2000s look like a golden interregnum of liberty by comparison. Meanwhile, in the United States, the damage was done. Manufacturing jobs went into steep decline after 2001, and over 5 million were lost to the new global marketplace. As Jordan Weissmann explained in a fine 2016 Slate article, “the shockingly fast collapse of the early 2000s simply convulsed blue-collar communities.”

Wrongheaded theory can explain some of why we did this to ourselves, but not all of it. Yes, we thought our access to Chinese markets would outweigh any price paid by giving China access to American markets. But we still had to know that kicking down the barriers overnight would cause extreme dislocation to countless Americans. Why we did it that way, rather than allowing for a less disruptive phase-in that would buy people time to adapt to the change, is something few people seem to ask. Many blue-collar Americans experienced their own version of the so-called shock therapy visited upon Russia in the 1990s, when millions of ordinary Russians suddenly found themselves without work, money, or hope. But few of our leading voices noticed. Meanwhile, China has been notably eager to prevent abrupt economic destabilization on its own turf, however swift its pace of change has been. You could even argue that its economic gradualism over the past 40 years would have been a good example to follow. But we thought of ourselves as the teachers.

In finance, wealth and glory can accrue to those who are vindicated by their prophecies, like Michael Burry in “the Big Short.” In politics, not so much. If Washington has any lesson for those of high ambition, it’s that being right and on your own is far worse for your career than being wrong and part of a crowd. Twenty years ago, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, chaired by Dennis Kucinich, warned that granting China regularized status would make its low wages and unsafe factories a plus to investors rather than a minus, with consequences including a larger trade deficit, “loss of U.S. jobs, and lower average wages in the U.S.” Such predictions attracted derision at the time and are forgotten today. Meanwhile, the voices of authority retain their authority. Back in 2000, experts from places like the Peterson Institute for International Economics could dismiss predictions of large trade deficits as “an absurd extrapolation” and carry the day. Today, a new crop of experts from the Peterson Institute for International Economics can go to Davos and call the latest trade deal with China a disaster, confident of a warm reception.

But Davos doesn’t have that much to worry about, anyway. For all the anxiety Donald Trump has caused with trade tariffs, it is clear why his latest deal with China led to what Axios described as “palpable relief” among global executives. With the unsentimental aim of getting trade flows equalized, it doesn’t drive much of a wedge between the United States and China. If anything, it might even increase the integration of the two sides, by ramping up China’s purchases of U.S. goods. And this brings us back to the question posed at the outset: Is that closeness what we want? For that matter, is it what China wants?

We don’t seem to know, and we don’t seem to be discussing it much. In the foreign-policy establishment, the stance toward Beijing reflects curious and incompatible impulses. You can see this in the pronouncements of a centrist Democrat like Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, whom I single out only because she is believed to represent common sense and moderation. On the one hand, we’re supposed be on guard against a country that “weaponizes its economy” and embeds “itself in our most sensitive infrastructure through Internet firms,” as Klobuchar warned in a speech last year. On the other hand, Trump is wrong to have imposed tariffs and disrupted business arrangements, because it addressed the “wrong things” and, to cite a story of Klobuchar’s from the last Democratic debate, threw Americans like “Derek, Mark, [and] Salvador” out of work.

Where does that leave us, then? Get tough with China, but also get back to normal. Tighten our embrace, but make it colder. Highlight the costs of trade barriers to Derek, Mark, and Salvador today, but ignore the costs of permanent trade normalization with China to millions of Dereks, Marks, and Salvadors yesterday. By contrast, the trade proposals of someone like Elizabeth Warren, who wants to enshrine high labor standards as a condition of any agreement, offer something more consistent and often seem to be even tougher than those of Donald Trump, as Politico pointed out last summer. (That’s provided they’re sincere.) The idea within the business-friendly wings of the two parties appears to be that Beijing is best constrained in any hegemonic ambitions by all the mutual commitments and intricate trade ties to the United States. But the power of trade to tame clashing interests or nationalistic passions is limited. Europe in 1914 had more economic integration than it would for many decades afterward, but that didn’t prevent the guns of August.

There is an alternative to an interdependence with China, which Donald Trump’s current trade deal seems to be increasing. That would be an amicable disentangling. Keep up the cultural exchanges and tourism and personal friendships, but reduce the economic consanguinity. Make our relationship agreeable, not indispensable, and try to avoid standing in the way of one another. After all, each side has abundant natural resources, a massive market, and its own hemisphere. Now, whether this would be feasible or wise is uncertain, of course, because it’s still a small world, and great powers can’t help running into one another at times. If Trump’s rise has shown us anything, however, it’s that radical questions are ignored at our peril. So, again: Do we want to decouple from China?

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