DETROIT – Tom Watkins, a former Michigan state superintendent of schools who now lives most of the time in China, saw something fascinating and frightening there a few weeks ago.
“It was in a small town on the outskirts of Nanjing, the ancient capital of China. I turned to see a man sitting on his motor scooter talking angrily in Chinese.” He talked too rapidly for Watkins to make out most of it. “But I could pick out two words he repeated over and over. One was Trump.”
The other was what you might call the signature obscenity in the English language; think of the initials MF. “Meiguo ren (American people) are hen hao” (very good) the man said.
But “Trump – MF.” Odds are that the motor scooter man wasn’t an expert on economics or international trade. His sentiments, are however, widespread in China, said Watkins, who now helps run the Way American school there.
And that, plus the uncertainty in trade, tariffs and other aspects of the relationship between the two nations, has Watkins, whose passion these days is building stronger relationships between America, especially Michigan, and China, deeply worried.
“This bilateral relationship is the most important in the world today. All major issues will intersect at the corner of Beijing and Washington, D.C., and how our leaders manage this will impact not just people in China and America but all of humanity,” he said.
Watkins, who is 65, doesn’t think China is blameless in the rift between the two countries; Beijing has indeed been guilty of what he sees as unfair trade practices and currency manipulation, and he agrees it is both fair and right to call them on it.
He also knows the leadership has been guilty of human rights abuses, and he was in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, when the government brutally massacred pro-Democracy protestors.
Plus, “after a lifetime of traveling around China, and seeing China’s astonishing and rapid economic transformation, I understand why China poses a threat to American economic interests,” he said.
But he believes cooperation is essential.
And he thinks the continued unpredictability of the President’s trade and tariff policies has badly damaged America. “The problem with President Trump’s trade war is that it is tactically flawed – independently reacting to individual events rather than springing from a thought-out comprehensive strategic direction,” he said.
Beyond that, he fears Americans will be hurt most by the trade war. “They already are being hurt. The American consumer, farmer and manufacturer is paying, and paying dearly, for this economic tantrum.”
Tom Watkins is, to be sure, a Democrat, who got his start in public life in the 1980s an aide to then-Gov. James Blanchard, who later made him director of the Department of Health.
But there is also plenty of non-partisan evidence that Trump’s ongoing trade and tariff wars carry the threat of heavy damage to the U.S. economy, especially in the Rust Belt states.
The International Business Times reported that Indiana, Ohio and Michigan “each have upwards of 25,000 jobs that rely on U.S. exports to China,” and which may be at direct risk.
The highly respected Center for Automotive Research, otherwise known as CAR, published a study earlier this year on the impacts of the President’s automotive trade policies.
Kristin Dziczek, the group’s vice-president for industry, labor and economics, took an updated look at the study, and estimated that the administration’s proposed tariffs and other restrictive trade policies could cost as many as 368,000 jobs in this country.
The study shows they could also add as much as $2,000 to the price of an American-built car, and $3,700 to the cost of imports,
The Detroit Free Press reported that if the President were able to follow through on his threat to make American companies leave China, this would be especially devastating to General Motors, which made $2 billion last year from selling its cars there.
Additionally, the tariffs that have already been imposed on the agricultural products Michigan exports to China are hurting family farms across the state, according to media reports.
Kathy Maurer, a spokesperson for the Michigan soybean industry, called them simply “devastating,” according to the MLive media group. Farm bankruptcies are up; agricultural imports to China last year were less than half what they were the year before, thanks to retaliatory tariffs; they are down more this year.
Tom Watkins thinks our nation, or at least the current administration, is looking at our relationship with China the wrong way. “We’ve taken our eyes off the prize, he said.
“America needs to create a national strategy, yes, to counter the threat of China’s rise. But our leadership needs to understand that our greatest fear should not be China’s successes, but its potential failure. What happens in China won’t stay in China,” he said.
That’s hard to dispute, given that China has 1.4 billion people, and a rapidly growing per capita income and middle class.
Watkins noted that historically, isolationism has been a losing strategy. “As this century unfolds, those that invest in knowledge, talent, education, creativity, artificial intelligence and infrastructure will prevail,” he noted. China is doing that.
He just hopes those in
charge in Washington, as well as Lansing and Columbus, are listening.
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