This is all normal for China bashers, I suppose. For those who wish to blame China for all of America’s economic woes, Obama’s China trip was another good reason to repackage the same tired Op/Eds.

Case in point: Harold Meyerson at the Washington Post. Meyerson is someone I enjoy reading, particularly because of his pro-labor political stances. However, that pro-labor position often results in very questionable columns about the US-China bilateral relationship and how international trade is, to put it bluntly, a very bad thing.

This time Meyerson’s basic premise is that the current state of affairs between the US and China, which he feels is way out of whack in favor of the PRC, was the direct result of mistaken US policy:

So as we try to rebalance our relationship with China, let’s not entertain any illusions that our growing dependence on that nation was the result of an unalterable tectonic shift in global power. Our economic elites wanted the higher profits that came with cheaper Chinese labor. They prevailed, and today we are floundering to clean up their mess.

This is the kind of nonsensical thinking that is unfortunately common in Washington (I fear).

Meyerson’s point makes some sense if the world consisted only of China and the United States, and the world economy was limited to Chinese products, made by Chinese workers for Chinese-based companies and sold to the US, and US products, made by US workers for US-based companies and sold to China.

If that were true, and if we ignore comparative advantage, then every single job lost in the US manufacturing sector could be blamed on China (assuming constant demand for relevant products).

But the world does not work that way. If China wasn’t making cheap toys and electronics, then India or Mexico or a half dozen other countries would be doing so, probably with a whole lot of US FDI as well. The US would still have a trade deficit, although it might be dispersed among a larger number of nations.

Meyerson points to the 1999/2000 China WTO deal, and the related US designation of the PRC as a permanent “normal” trading partner, as the moment when things went wrong.

Sure, the WTO was a watershed event, and it has led to a large number of legal reforms. But does Meyerson really believe that because of this decision (or any other single decision of US lawmakers), China would not have opened up its economy to foreign investment? That’s laughable – it was government policy here since 1978, and the WTO deal only accelerated/codified the process.

By 1999, China was already well on its way to FDI liberalization, and by then most manufacturing and many service sectors were open to wholly foreign-owned enterprises (i.e., 100% subisdiaries). A lot has happened since then, but the WTO decision did not result in a metaphorical light switch somewhere in the bowels of the Ministry of Commerce being flipped to the “On” position.

The US allows its corporations to invest in other countries. The PRC wanted to attract investment. It happened, and in some ways was inevitable. But Meyerson goes even further, saying that those earlier policy decisions not only led to a lot of FDI and loss of jobs, it led to the US ceding some measure of global power to China.

The US has not “allowed” China to somehow gain dominance over it, screwing over American labor in the process. Those manufacturing jobs have been on the wane for 30 years, and the recent ones could just have easily gone to Vietnam, Bangladesh, India or Mexico if not China.

As to China’s rising influence, I assume that Meyerson is talking about China’s forex holdings. This is the usual canard that because China is sitting on a lot of dollars, it can somehow dictate policy to the US. Ridiculous.

China is not America’s banker. It has invested in dollar-denominated assets, including Treasury bills. If it dumped a sizeable amount, it would be totally screwed, and therefore it will not do so. China has already talked trash about the dollar on a periodic basis, and has attempted to diversify its forex holdings. But this tells us more about China’s precarious position (think death grip) than anything else. China’s “managed float” exchange policy is the root of all evils, Beijing knows it, but the government can’t find the right time/method for liberalization without causing major economic dislocation.

I’m not sure how you can take that reality and somehow blame it on US companies that have invested in China over the years. Apples and oranges.

One last point. It’s also easy to look back at the last ten years and complain that China has not changed enough to satisfy American politicians. The reason for the sour grapes is that some folks were hopelessly naive in believing supporters of permanent normal trade relations who said that with a deal, a new era of political reform in the PRC would definitely follow.

In other words: of course things weren’t going to completely change here overnight. Regardless, the critics also ignore the dramatic changes that have occured over here over the past ten years (they are astonishing and not limited to economic growth).

While I understand that some folks are impatient, and many have been working very hard over many years on political reform issues, ten years is really not a long time, and we should be careful to spell out exactly what our metric for success really is.

I fear that some people think US policy towards China is a failure because YouTube is blocked and China has yet to roll out the red carpet for a certain exiled religious figure (who shall remain nameless). Sad, that.