What were Trump's specific accusations justifying imposing tariffs against China? [closed]

Question

President Trump repeatedly talked about China's unfair trade practices. What were those?

Do other countries like China install unfair trade guidelines? Or, is China being targeted "unfairly"?

Answer 1

Peter Navarro, the White House National Trade Council and Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Director, put out a report called "How China’s Economic Aggression Threatens the Technologies and Intellectual Property of the United States and the World". In it there are many specific accusations against Chinese "economic aggression", with evidence cited for each. There's also a video of Navarro doing a press conference about the report. Here are the accusations:

1. Physical theft and cyber-enabled theft of technologies and IP
   • Physical theft of technologies and IP through economic espionage
   • Cyber-enabled espionage and theft
   • Evasion of U.S. export control laws
   • Counterfeiting and piracy
   • Reverse engineering
2. Coercive and intrusive regulatory gambits
   • Foreign ownership restrictions
   • Adverse administrative approvals and licensing requirements
   • Discriminatory patent and other IP rights restrictions
   • Security reviews force technology and IP transfers
   • Secure and controllable technology standards
   • Data localization mandates
   • Burdensome and intrusive testing
   • Discriminatory catalogues and lists
   • Government procurement restrictions
   • Indigenous technology standards that deviate from international norms
   • Forced research and development
   • Antimonopoly law extortion
   • Expert review panels force disclosure of PI
   • Chinese communist party co-opts corporate governance
   • Placement of Chinese employees with foreign joint ventures
3. Economic coercion
   • Export restraints restrict access to raw materials
   • Monopsony purchasing power
4. Information harvesting
   • Open source collection of science and technology information
   • Chinese nationals in U.S. as non-traditional information collectors
   • Recruitment of science, technology, business, and finance talent
5. State-sponsored, technology-seeking investment
   • Chinese state actors involved in technology-seeking FDI
   • Chinese investment vehicles used to acquire and transfer U.S. technologies and IP (mergers and acquisitions, greenfield investments, seed and venture funding)

The report makes the case that they are all done in bad faith as part of a deliberate concerted effort to:

• Protect China’s home market from imports and competition
• Expand China’s share of global markets
• Secure and control core natural resources globally
• Dominate traditional manufacturing industries
• Acquire key technologies and intellectual property from other countries, including the United States
• Capture the emerging high-technology industries that will drive future economic Growth and many advancements in the defense industry

The tariffs are therefore partly retaliations in response to what the Trump administration views as aggressive actions by the Chinese state.

Answer 2

Before we discuss qualitative "fairness", there's a practical reason to single China out even if it's not qualitatively different: scale.

US trade deficit is $795B total. Of that, $375B or 47%, is with China (source: Wikipedia) - dwarfing deficit with any other country (more than twice the size of next biggest entity, EU, and more than 5 times the deficit with biggest single country, Mexico). And the trade deficit in goods with china is 65% of total (source).

As such, reducing China deficit is the most effective way to reduce overall deficit, on per-country basis.

Additionally, that deficit is the result of the greatest import/export imbalance among major trading partners. If you ignore countries with less than $20B exports from USA, China exports 3.9 times more of what it imports from USA - with the next largest ratio being 2.1 for germany and 2.0 for Japan (source: same Wiki table, but exported to Excel and imports divided by exports and filtering out smaller importers of US goods).

As such, reducing China deficit via a trade war is the least negatively-impactful way to reduce overall deficit, as there are less exports to China to negatively affect.

The official reason for the first round of tariffs was theft of intellectual property (source):

The investigation concluded that China has stolen or coerced US companies into turning over their intellectual property through a series of state-run structural maneuvers, including its requirement that foreign companies partner with Chinese companies to access the Chinese market, said Everett Eissenstat, the deputy director of the National Economic Council for international economic affairs.

The investigation also assessed that China has stolen US intellectual property by hacking US computer networks, though senior administration officials said Thursday's tariffs would not account for the value of that intellectual property theft, which they estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

I'm omitting other accusations as they were NOT actually leveled as part of the first round of tariffs (e.g. currency manipulation, pricing etc...)