Well, some people thought this week’s Strategic Economic Dialogue (SED) with China was a smashing success.  A smiling Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was quoted in USA Today as saying the talks succeeded in “creating a foundation” for future achievement, while Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan deemed the meetings “highly successful.”

But laying the groundwork for some hypothetical future success really just means changing the bucket under a leaking pipe.  It doesn’t necessarily fix the plumbing.  As AAM Director Scott Paul said in the same USA Today article what’s needed is a “more robust approach from Washington”—one that specifically puts China on notice regarding continued violations of world trade law.

Ironically, the shuffling of paper that constituted the bulk of this week’s meeting did little to quiet Congressional discontent.  Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) had already co-authored a letter to Secretary Paulson signed by 10 other Senators that urged action on China’s undervalued Yuan in order to ensure that its value is “determined by markets, not government interventions.”  The various Senators believe that if China “plays by the same rules, our manufacturers can compete and thrive in the global economy.”

Stabenow and company concluded by noting that U.S. manufacturers cannot “afford further delay in addressing the misaligned [Yuan].”  The distortions caused by this currency manipulation have directly contributed tomoer than 1.8 million U.S. jobs lost since 2001.

In a “China Index” released yesterday, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) noted more problems from unbalanced trade with China.  Chief among these were the 581,000 manufacturing jobs that the U.S. has lost just since the first SED meeting in December 2006—which means that more than 4% of U.S. factory jobs have evaporated in less than a year and a half.

It’s not just lost jobs that concern Sen. Brown, though.  His index also noted 457 Chinese products recalled in the same brief period, a reminder that China’s unregulated production poses more than job worries for American consumers.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and ManufactureThis frets that cheery chit-chat and endless dialogues with China merely extend an unhappy status quo.  As Scott Paul noted in a Bloomberg article this morning, yet another bureaucratic SED meeting simply “squandered another opportunity to make U.S.-China trade more balanced and market-driven.”  It’s action that’s needed, not words.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Manufacturing in the U.S., Holding China Accountable, Enforcing Trade Laws. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.