The first is easy to explain. The US likes being number 1, and if anyone else, whether the Chinese or the Japanese or the Indians looks like they're going to be number 1, the US doesn't like it.
The second is this: for the last 40-50 years, the US and China have been in a hugely mutually beneficial relationship, at least on the corporate level. American companies outsourced many of its lower wage lower skilled manufacturing to China and China has saved those companies a ton of money and made their owners a lot more profit. In order for China's economy to keep growing though, the Chinese believed, correctly, that they needed to move up the food chain since their labor is not as cheap as it once was. So they identified 10 "industries of the future" where they want their companies to dominate. American companies are, once again correctly, worried that since these are the industries that we would also like to dominate, that the Chinese, if they are successful, will literally eat our lunch.
There's a bunch of other stuff relating to the South China Sea, Taiwan, forced IP transfer, hacking, trade subsidies, etc. that are also causing tensions, but those two are probably the biggest ones.
They may not state it publicly but I think all the industrialied producer economies Fron the US to Europe and Asia are scared to death of the implications China 2025 has for there own high-tech high-value industries.
The US perceives the economic relationship with China to be one way. Prior to the recent trade flair ups, China was given preferential treatment, perhaps as part of a strategy to create a geopolitical ally instead of an enemy through trade. This appeared to be working for several decades with China opening up to the world and giving the appearance of freer markets and more democratization as they became wealthier. As their economy continued to grow and modernize, the trade imbalance between the United States became huge ($539 Billion in imports in 2018, only $120 Billion in exports [0]). This means that each year hundreds of billions of dollars flows directly from the US economy into the Chinese economy. In addition, with President Xi the country appears to be sliding back towards a nationalistic totalitarianism.
While both countries can still benefit from this trade, the US government is taking the stance that China has been benefiting and the US has not. The reasons that are most often cited are that the US was open to almost all Chinese imports, while many US imports were restricted or taxed more heavily than local goods [1]. Worse than that, if a US company wanted to operate in China, they were required to do so through Chinese partners that would own half of a joint venture, and intellectual property would be shared with them. After a short term benefit, all of a sudden the Chinese partner would be running their own factories, and competing against the US company with the US companies own technology. These companies are often state owned and receive funding that is considered to be anti free trade and is generally illegal in most international agreements (see the legal squabbles between Airbus and Boeing for reference). Finally the US company would be squeezed by the Chinese government (national or local), and all sorts of issues that wouldn't impact the local company would mysteriously befall the foreign company. After local Chinese companies were created, funded and protected in China by the Chinese government, they could compete with their former US partners around the world.
Therefore while the US market was open to China, the Chinese market is not really open to the US. Finally, it has been widely known for a long time that China hosts state sponsored industrial espionage units that hack companies around the world and steal intellectual property to provide to Chinese companies[2]. US companies will spend billions of dollars researching how to do something, and then a Chinese company can just start producing it, sometimes even before the US company does. Finally, it seems like laws are not enforced in favor of US victims. If a US company steals and sells Chinese IP, they can be successfully sued in US courts. If a Chinese company steals and sells US IP, no enforcement is taken. This is a huge problem especially for small inventors, the moment they create something they lose the market to cheap Chinese knockoffs, and have no power to protect their brand or invention.
For these reasons and others, China is viewed as having a predatory trade relationship with the United States. I've heard that Huawei in particular is known to have gotten a big jump by outright stealing Cisco's router and selling it[3], and has continued with similar tactics, alongside the accusations that it is essentially an arm of Chinese intelligence services and provides backdoors in their products. I've actually heard from Chinese friends that Huawei was very proud of their ability to steal Cisco's router and it is used as a case study.
And while all this is happening, the US had a special trade relationship with China such that it was cheaper to ship goods to individuals in the US from China, instead of from inside the US itself[4].
So basically a viewpoint that I tend to agree with is that this is all about resetting the trade relationship to a normal one between peers. The US is no longer supporting a third world country, but dealing with a fellow world power that is fully capable of taking care of itself. I am confused myself why it is being portrayed any other way, and what the motivations are for doing so. It seems to me that the US has demands to be treated fairly and have an equal trading relationship (according to their point of view), and if that doesn't happen the US can impose tariffs that will rebalance trade between the two countries.
[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-all-the-stuff-the-us... [1] https://www.export.gov/article?id=China-Import-Tariffs [2] (pdf) https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/services/pdf... [3] https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c... [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/11/05/how-the-...
Fairly sure you're wrong on this, the US now wants an advantageous relationship. Not an even score.
Just returning to even ground would let China keep the advantages it has reaped.
I expect that the tariffs will stay in place permanently because any acceptable deal would require the Chinese publicly harassing their own people on behalf of the US government, and there is no way the US could enforce that. So the easiest solution are tariffs that will rebalance trade naturally, and probably the world polarizing into two main economic zones, US-centric and China-centric. And then we all just try not to kill each other for the forseeable future.
The thing that really annoys me about this is that if China would just be patient and play by the rules, be genuinely friendly to its neighbors, it would take them like 20 or 30 years longer but then the whole world would just place the crown on their head and they would peacefully become the world's only superpower. Naturally, maybe even justly. Now we all get misery because of impatience.
just playing the devils advocate but, couldn’t the same have be said about the us (e.g imf, world bank, regime change wars etc)?
China is an economic threat because it will inevitably be superior to the US economy. India is an economic threat for the same reason.
This is ridiculous. No one thinks it is one way. The spanish sending south american gold back to spain was one way.
What is actually happening, is some people think it is unfairly biased towards China.
Huawei stole secrets from Nortel that eventually caused it to collapse, it only got worse from there. They've stolen IP from many other countries, and at this point the US is accusing them of not just stealing IP actual actually working with Chinese intelligence to make sure all Huawei devices can be hacked by China.
Your being British and out of the loop is pretty bad because your government is just as much of a target.
* Trump has been on at China for a long time.
* US establishment growing increasingly worried about the sophistication of Chinese tech and are viewing Huawei as a strategic threat. Especially since the latest generation of Chinese telecoms tech has arguably leapfrogged western offerings. Free trade works brilliantly until you stop being the top dog.
* NSA doesn't the idea of Chinese being able to use their tech to spy on US. They'd prefer domestic US companies build tech to spy on us for them instead.
* "National security concerns" is kind of a "get of jail free card" when it comes to escaping WTO rules on protectionism, so it fits in pretty well with the rest of the trade war.
They do talk about [17m04+] the possibility of the network being shutdown and the fallout of that, and have a dramatisation.
Nonetheless the NSA is trying to pretend that Huawei is currently installing backdoors.