银背大猩猩vs狮子:洛杉矶时报：中国政府目光短浅得令人难以置信

    “假如我们想让美国经济重振，就需要大大削减贸易逆差。从统计学上来说，这就意味着要大大减少跟中国的贸易逆差。”

    “每一天美国消费者从中国购买的东西都要超出美国向中国出售的东西10亿美元。在去掉石油进口之后，美国的商品贸易逆差的70%是跟中国的贸易逆差造成的。这种对中国进口的依赖导致民主的美国欠世界最大的共产党国家一万多亿美元，而中国有3万多亿美元的外汇储备，其中大部分是以美元结算的。”

    “我们如何消除，或者至少大大减少对中国的贸易逆差呢？首先，我们必须戳穿那种神话，这就是中国的制造业比我们强，主要是因为劳动力成本低廉。确实，低廉的劳动力成本是一个因素，但假如人们仔细研究中国制造业的优势，就会看到其优势实际上是许多不公平的贸易做法的复杂组合，所有的那些做法按自由贸易规则来说都是非法的。”

    纳瓦罗教授接着列举了中国的不公平以及非法的贸易做法，其中包括贸易补贴、明目张胆地盗窃美国的技术和商业机密，伪造美国名牌产品，操纵货币汇率，强迫希望在中国营业或销售的美国公司转让技术，等等。

    纳瓦罗教授接着写道，“除此之外，中国政府目光短浅得令人难以置信，愿意以巨大的环境破坏和大量的工作场所伤亡来换取一丁点生产成本的节省，而做到这一切的原因就是极为松懈的行业管制规则。例如，据世界卫生组织报告，空气污染每年造成将近70万中国人死亡，相当于每年美国怀俄明州的人口全部死光。与此同时，中国官员承认，每年死于煤矿矿难的人有2000多人，而美国只有50多人。”

    “事情很清楚。（中国用来占美国上风的）所有这一切实实在在的经济武器导致美国成千上万的工厂关闭，导致美国成百万的工人失业。而这一切都是在自由贸易的虚假旗号下进行的。”

    本篇英文原文：

How China unfairly bests the U.S. Op-Ed

China's manufacturing advantage over the U.S. is actually due to a complex array of unfair trade practices, all of which are illegal under free-trade rules.

June 21, 2011|By Peter Navarro

The American economy has been in trouble for more than a decade, and no amount of right-wing tax cuts or left-wing fiscal stimuli will solve the primary structural problem underpinning our slow growth and high unemployment. That problem is a massive, persistent trade deficit — most of it with China — that cuts the number of jobs created by nearly the number we need to keep America fully employed.

To understand why huge U.S. trade deficits represent the taproot of the nation's economic woes, it's crucial to understand that four factors drive our gross domestic product: consumption, business investment, government spending and net exports. This discussion focuses on net exports.

Net exports represent the difference between how much we export and import. A trade deficit means net exports are negative, and that directly reduces both the GDP growth rate and rate of job creation.

America's trade deficit is costing us close to 1% of GDP growth a year at a loss of almost 1 million jobs annually. That's millions of jobs we have failed to create over the last decade; and if we had those jobs now, we wouldn't see continuing high unemployment numbers, padlocked houses under foreclosure and empty factories pushing up weeds.

It follows that if we want to get America back to work, we need to sharply reduce our trade deficit. As a statistical matter, that means sharply reducing our trade deficit with China.

Every business day, American consumers buy $1 billion more in Chinese exports than American manufacturers sell to China, and China alone accounts for about 70% of America's trade deficit in goods, excluding oil imports. This "Chinese import dependence" has led a democratic America to owe the largest communist nation in the world more than $1 trillion, while China holds more than $3 trillion in foreign reserves, most of them in U.S. dollars.

To put these dollar reserves in perspective, that's more than enough money for China to buy a controlling interest in every major company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, including Alcoa, Caterpillar, Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart, and still leave billions to spare.

So how can we eliminate, or at least drastically reduce, our trade deficit with China? For starters, we must puncture the myth that China's main manufacturing edge is solely its cheap labor. Indeed, while low labor costs are a factor, when you carefully research the biggest source of China's manufacturing advantage, it is actually a complex array of unfair trade practices, all of which are illegal under free-trade rules.

The most potent of China's "weapons of job destruction" are an elaborate web of export subsidies; the blatant piracy of America's technologies and trade secrets; the counterfeiting of valuable brand names like Nike and Chevy; a cleverly manipulated and grossly undervalued currency; and the forced transfer of the technology of any American company wishing to operate on Chinese soil or sell into the Chinese market.

Each of these unfair trade practices is expressly prohibited both by World Trade Organization rules as well as rules established by the U.S. government, e.g., the Treasury Department has sanctions against currency manipulation (which, alas, the Obama administration refuses to use against China despite campaign promises to do so).

In addition, there is the Chinese Communist Party's incredibly shortsighted willingness to trade tremendous environmental damage and a surfeit of workplace deaths and injuries for a few more pennies of production cost advantage, all because of ultra-lax regulatory standards. For example, according to the World Health Organization, almost 700,000 Chinese citizens die annually from the effects of air pollution — that's like losing everybody in Wyoming every year — while Chinese officials acknowledge more than 2,000 coal mining deaths annually, compared with fewer than 50 in the United States.

Make no mistake. All of these real economic weapons have led to the shutdown of thousands of American factories and turned millions of American workers into collateral damage, all under the false flag of so-called free trade.

The second myth we must expose if we are to ever reverse the job-killing trade deficits we now run with China is the idea that free trade always benefits both countries. That doesn't hold true if one country cheats on the other. Instead, when a mercantilist China uses unfair trade practices to wage war on our manufacturing base, the American economy is the big loser.

Given America's structural problem with China and absent constructive trade reform, our economic prospects can only dim further. The presidential candidate who grasps that essential truth, which is becoming increasingly understood by much of the electorate, will be the one who wins in 2012. We need someone who can lead this country to a trade relationship with China founded on the American ideals of free and fair trade rather than a set of mercantilist and socialist trade policies that employ the Chinese masses at the expense of American workers.

Peter Navarro is a business professor at UC Irvine, a CNBC contributor and the coauthor with Greg Autry of "Death by China: Confronting the Dragon — A Global Call to Action."