Xi Is Making the World Pay for China’s Mistakes

President Trump’s readiness to use coercive tariffs presents a profound threat to the postwar economic and political order, introducing an unpredictability to global commerce that makes it difficult for trade partners to know how to react — and next to impossible for businesses to plan.

But he is not the only danger the world economy faces and may not even be the biggest. That may be President Xi Jinping of China, whose more strategic and calibrated industrial and economic policies are fundamentally distorting and harming global trade.

Trade usually refers to the combination of imports and exports. But Mr. Xi has upended that idea, radically changing China’s trade interaction with the rest of the world, at least when it comes to manufactured goods. Over the past six years, China’s imports of such goods increased by an average of only $15 billion a year, essentially no change at all when inflation is taken into account. Its manufactured exports, on the other hand, have grown more than 10 times as fast, by over $150 billion a year. When it comes to manufactured goods, trade with China is virtually a one-way street.

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