Moon of Alabama — Moon of Alabama U.S. Decoupling From China Forces Others To Decouple From U.S.

The now not-so-hidden agenda is to take Chimerica apart, although I haven't seen it in the Western media yet, and this is decidedly not where American business and finance want to go.

Moon of Alabama
U.S. Decoupling From China Forces Others To Decouple From U.S.

Manufacturers Want to Quit China for Vietnam. They’re Finding It Impossible. Nobody has China's scale, infrastructure, experience, and supply chains — Niharika Mandhana

“China has a 15-year head start—whatever you want, someone’s doing it,” said Wing Xu, the operations director for Omnidex Group, which helps make large pumps for Pennsylvania-based industrial equipment manufacturer McLanahan Corp....

Checkpoint Asia
Manufacturers Want to Quit China for Vietnam. They’re Finding It Impossible. Nobody has China's scale, infrastructure, experience, and supply chains

Niharika Mandhana, The Wall Street Journal

The Trillion-Dollar Grift: The Long-Term Plan for US-China Decoupling — Peter Lee

Keeping the negotiations creeping along while encouraging the decoupling dynamic through tariffs & sanctions allowed the China hawks to dodge the onus of hurting the US economy for the sake of US hegemonic goals.

Now, as we're entering a phase of pretty much open economic warfare, maybe that mask is ready to drop....

Preparing for the showdown.

As I have been saying,  the sine qua non for permanent US global hegemony is dividing Russia and China into smaller states that can never challenge the US. Then, the US can effectively manage them through the neoliberal economic/financial/political world order based on an empire and its vassals. Although in his later years Zbig withdrew from the grand chessboard geostrategy based on Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman that he made famous, it remains very much alive in US strategic circles owing to its compelling logic and US elite commitment to the Wolfowitz Doctrine.

China Matters
The Trillion-Dollar Grift: The Long-Term Plan for US-China Decoupling

Peter Lee aka "China Hand"

See also

The purpose of the protest is to force a Chinese invasion of Hong Kong,giving the West ammunition for its own invasion, overt or covert. This is a color revolution.

So far, the Chinese leadership is not falling for the bait. So the protestors are upping the ante to force it.

Whatever the outcome, the fate of Hong Kong is now sealed. The rise of Shanghai as the Chinese financial capital will make Hong Kong redundant and it will eventually become an outlying province with little to no significance for the center. In fact, it will become a reminder of The Humiliation that the Chinese will isolate and attempt to forget.

The Spectator
There’s no Tank Man without the tanks

Dominic Green

See also

Longish and detailed.

Foreign Affairs
Trump’s Assault on the Global Trading System
Chad P. Bown And Douglas A. Irwin

Also

RT
Beijing: US ‘insanely involved in anti-Chinese criminal cases in Hong Kong’

Tyler Cowen — New results on the China shock, furthermore the China shock is largely over

Is the US trying to lock the barn door after the horse is gone left over offshoring jobs to China? A new paper suggests so.

Marginal Revolution
New results on the China shock, furthermore the China shock is largely over
Tyler Cowen | Holbert C. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center

Timothy Taylor — US Not the Source of China's Growth, China Not the Source of America's Problems

A sizeable portion of the US discussions about economic policy toward China seem to me based on two conceptual mistakes. One mistake is that China's rapid economic growth fundamentally depends on trade with the US. The other mistake is that the bulk of US economic problems depend in some fundamental way on trade with China....

It's worth spelling out the underlying logic here a bit. The formula for economic growth is to invest in human capital, physical capital, and technology, in an economic environment that provides incentives for hard work, efficiency, and innovation. China has made dramatic changes in all of these areas, and they are the main drivers behind China's extraordinary economic growth in the last four decades, and its expectation of above-global-average growth heading into the future.... 

Conversely, the US economy has not done a great job of investing in the fundamentals of economic growth....

These US economic issues and others are in any substantial part not the result of trade with China, or the result of international trade at all. Lasting solutions will not be found in trade squabbles, either…

The great leveling is in full swing as the emerging world catches up, often with leapfrogging. Since capital investment is flowing to the emerging world where returns are greatest, the developed economies are treading water or stagnating as financialization takes over.

Conversable Economist
US Not the Source of China's Growth, China Not the Source of America's Problems
Timothy Taylor | Managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota

Reuters — U.S. sorghum armada U-turns at sea after China tariffs

Trade war in progress. Proceed with caution.

Reuters
Exclusive: U.S. sorghum armada U-turns at sea after China tariffs

Karl Plume, P.J. Huffstutter

Ken Moak — Reality check may make Trump rethink trade war

In news reports around the world, from Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post to RT.com, US President Donald Trump is reported to have softened his “tough” trade stance against China. In the April 8 reports, he said that Chinese President Xi Jinping will always be his friend and China and the US will negotiate a trade deal that will benefit the “two great nations,” a far cry from his blistering response of upping the ante to triple the number of Chinese goods subject to tariffs.

But in true Trump tradition, he claimed victory, suggesting that “China will do the right thing and bring down trade barriers [against the US].” The Washington Times reported on April 10 that Trump’s economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, said China may have “blinked” because Xi’s Boao Forum touched on China opening up and lowering the tariff on cars.

However, if one were to examine Xi’s April 10 speech, he simply reiterated his promoting of and support for globalization. Xi’s promise to bring down trade barriers is not to appease Trump – it is consistent with his globalization narrative. Sorry, Mr Kudlow, President Xi did not “blink”. It might be your president that “blinked.”...

Asia Times

Reality check may make Trump rethink trade war

Ken Moak

See also at Asia Times

Trump’s trade offensive edges EU into China’s warm embrace

Xinhua — Chinese direct investment in U.S. plunges in 2017 due to policy shifts

Chinese direct investment in the United States fell by more than 35 percent in 2017 due to policy shifts in both countries, according to a new report jointly released on Tuesday by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (NCUSCR) and the Rhodium Group... 

Ecns
Chinese direct investment in U.S. plunges in 2017 due to policy shifts

Xinhua

Stephen S. Roach — America and China’s Codependency Trap

On August 14, President Donald Trump instructed the US Trade Representative to commence investigating Chinese infringement of intellectual property rights. Whatever the merit of such allegations, Chinese retaliation against US trade sanctions would almost certainly cause far more economic damage.

Project Syndicate
America and China’s Codependency Trap

Stephen S. Roach, former Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the firm's chief economist, now a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute of Global Affairs and a senior lecturer at Yale's School of Management

Dean Baker — If China Moves Away from Holding Dollars Then It Will be Doing What Bush-Obama Requested

This change could go far toward reducing the U.S. trade deficit, especially if other developing countries follow China's lead as they have in the past. The result would be millions of new jobs and also an important boost to wages. In other words, if China follows through on the path suggested in this article it would be good news for most of the country. Importers like Walmart and companies that have established production facilities in China, like General Electric, might be less pleased.

CEPR
If China Moves Away from Holding Dollars Then It Will be Doing What Bush-Obama RequestedDean Baker

Would also mean higher prices on formerly imported goods now being made in the US unless US corporations could find other low-wage, low benefit, low worker protection countries to export to the US and save in USD. Indonesia?

John Ross — China has overtaken the US to become the world's largest industrial producer

This is pretty astounding. And China is far from being a developed country yet. Long way to go before that and it is leaving the rest of the world in the dust. The question is whether this kind of growth can last. But China sailed through it's first pull back while the developed world is still trying to recover.

It is this enormous rise in China’s output which also drove the much discussed global shift in industrial production in favor of developing countries - in the six year period to June 2013, the latest date for which combined data is available, industrial production in advanced economies fell by 7% while output in developing economies rose by 65%.

...China accounted for the overwhelming bulk of the increase in the developing economies. Industrial production in Latin America rose by 5%, in Africa and the Middle East by 6%, and in Eastern Europe by 10%. But China’s industrial production in this period rose by 100% - industrial output in developing Asia as a whole rose by 65%, but the majority of this was accounted for by China....

It is naturally important not to exaggerate this scale of advance by China in industrial production. China’s industrial output is now considerably larger in value terms than the US, but the United States retains a substantial technological lead which it will take China a considerable period to catch up with. Due to a long period of globalization and consolidation by US companies, both processes which are only at early stages in China, US manufacturing firms are still four times the size of China’s in terms of overall global revenue– although between 2007 and 2013 Chinese manufacturing firms overtook Germany to become the third largest manufacturing companies of any country....

For the first time for over a century the US has been definitively replaced as the world’s largest industrial producer. Such a once in a century shift can literally only be described as historic. 

Key Trends in the World Economy
China has overtaken the US to become the world's largest industrial producer
John Ross | Senior Fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China

Xinhua Business — China to become top U.S. export destination by 2022: report

China will overtake Canada and Mexico to become the United States' largest export market by 2022, according to a report issued Tuesday.

U.S. exports to China will at least triple from the current level to reach 530 billion U.S. dollars, according to a report compiled by the China-United States Exchange Foundation, the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, China's Ministry of Commerce, and the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Exports to China will create a GDP worth 460 billion U.S. dollars for the United States, as well as create more than 3.34 million jobs, an increase of 2.63 million compared to 2010.
If the United States loosens its export restrictions on high-tech and energy products, the export volume could be much higher, the report said.

Xinhua Business

China to become top U.S. export destination by 2022: report

Jim Lobe — U.S.: Public More Concerned About Rising China Than Elites

Uh oh. Add rising xenophobia to widespread deficit hysteria. This can only have a bad end if it continues to grow and gets translated into policy.

IPS | Inter Press Service
U.S.: Public More Concerned About Rising China Than Elites
Jim Lobe

Andrew Sheng — China’s Next Transformation

During three decades of favorable global economic conditions, China created an integrated global production system unprecedented in scale and complexity. But now its policymakers must deal with the triple challenges of the unfolding European debt crisis, slow recovery in the United States, and a secular growth slowdown in China’s economy. All three challenges are interconnected, and mistakes by any of the parties could plunge the global economy into another recession.

To assess the risks and options for China and the world, one must understand China’s “Made in the World” production system, which rests on four distinct but mutually dependent pillars.

Project Syndicate
China’s Next Transformation
Andrew Sheng and Geng Xiao

China's first phase seems to be coming to a close. Can it make it through the transition to the next stage seamlessly or will there be problems?

Robert Oak — China's Indigenous Innovation Policy Bigger Threat to the U.S.. Economy Than Offshore Outsourcing

Is the US getting the short end of the stick in the Chimerica relationship through shortsightedness? Robert Oak says yes, and finds it alarming.

Read it at The Economic Populist

China's Indigenous Innovation Policy Bigger Threat to the U.S.. Economy Than Offshore Outsourcing
by Robert Oak