(MENAFN- Asia Times) This article is published here as a preview of the week's Global Risk-Reward Monitor.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on March 18 invited Chinese automakers to build plants in the United States, offering China the same deal that Ronald Reagan extended to Japan in the 1980s.
The former president vowed to impose a 100% tariff on Chinese car imports either directly from the mainland or from intermediaries like Mexico. But he added,“If they want to build a plant in Michigan, in Ohio, in South Carolina, they can, using American workers, they can. They can't send Chinese workers over here, which they sometimes do. But if they want to do that, we're welcome, right?”
Addressing Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Trump said,“You and I are friends.”
Trump's offer to China went unreported in virtually all media. Mainstream US media attacked the former president for using the term“bloodbath” to describe the impact of prospective Chinese imports on the American auto industry, implying that he had threatened actual violence if he was not elected. But the transcript of his remarks at a Dayton, Ohio, rally makes clear that he was referring to industry conditions.
Trump bobbleheads outside a 2024 Dayton Trump rally. Photo: Nick Evans / Ohio Capital Journal
Trump told the Dayton audience:
Industrial automation is accelerating in China and lagging in the United States. According to Zhang Weiwei , a professor at Fudan University, China already has 10,000 applications of 5G to the industrial Internet. Compare that with fewer than ten in the United States, by my informal count.
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