The art of the China deal
If the Chinese make good on their promises in the trade deal with the United States, it’s a “very big win” for President Trump, Fox Business and Fox News host Neil Cavuto said Wednesday.
Appearing on “America’s Newsroom” with host Sandra Smith, Cavuto said that the devil is in the details when it comes to phase one of the agreement.
“The Chinese have committed to buy $200 million worth of American goods, Sandra, over the next couple of years,” said Cavuto. “Now, they have made similar promises in the past.”
“In fact, they have created eight times since 2010, when they’ve made similar deals,” he said. “So, they’re kind of like me on diet resolutions. You’ve got to check them to see if they are not sneaking some cannolis in the back room.”…
If the Chinese don’t hold up their end of the bargain, Cavuto said the threat to them would potentially become more tariffs…
Would you say that extremely cautious optimism is in order?
Maybe it’s just me… but when talking of trade between the U.S.A. and China… $200 million seems a very, very small number.
Typo: “According to FOX Business, the purchases will total $205 billion to $210 billion over two years while Chinese sources indicate the buys would be between $215 billion and $220 billion.”
Who knows if China will actually live up to this. I will say that no matter what else has or may happen, President Trump deserves enormous credit for altering the public discussion on three things: trade, war, and immigration. Before him, elite consensus on all three had calcified into an almost cargo-cult mentality of doing the same thing over and over and hoping for better results. Even if Trump loses in 2020, it’s going to be almost impossible to go back to that mental fail state.
Mike
I think the intellectual property theft and these things are just as important as the trade numbers, not to mention our restrictions on Huawei,which even the Euros are starting to look at.
Count me among those who think that cautious optimism is in order.
Also, another salient point: the Chinese lords obviously think that Trump is going to cruise to re-election. Otherwise, they had no real incentive to reach a deal with him when they could just hold out and saunter back to the status quo ante with an incoming Democrat.
This is very significant.
Yes.
What basis is there for optimism? They’re communists! Nothing in their ideology eschews cheating, lying or any form of deceit. In regards to China; optimism rests upon the presumption that the Chinese leadership values economic success over Marxism.
Leopards don’t change their spots and neither do totalitarians.
But when faced with “Inconvenient Truths”… wishful thinking is never in short supply.
Under the Democrats articles written by professor Wagstaff (“whatever it is, im against it, even when i brought it up and commenced it, im against it”)… chuck schumer weighs in.
they really really do believe in the stupidity of the common man, and their superiority as people who went to a modern feminized college in which proxy reasons give good grades and courses are taught that leave one economically destitute believing a beneficent communist state would up welfare to a point where a layabout would be happy to layabout…
I believe that “created” in the Cavuto quote is a typo for cheated — the Chinese have cheated eight times since 2010.
So I will say yes, I believe we can be cautiously optimistic that the Chinese will behave differently this time. In fact, the market is very optimistic that it will be different this time.
In fact, the market is pretty certain we are heading directly into paradise.
Intellectual property theft is a tough one, because piracy tends to become culturally engrained, and I’d guess it takes a huge police action to make a big change. On the other hand, I’m thinking like an American who is not familiar with how police states operate.
The related thing is the coerced but voluntary intellectual property transfer. This used to be the price of doing business in China, and is undone with this agreement, if I understand it correctly. Potentially a very big plus.
The other positive IMHO, is that while the additional U.S. tariffs have been stopped with this agreement, the old tariffs stay in place until we can verify that China has made good on its promises. (Define “made good.”)
Some have said that while we got a lot from the deal, we gave a lot. I’ve heard almost nothing about the latter. Gotta look at pros and cons.
I heard there is some big new dispute resolution and litigation system created by the deal. Welfare for lawyers and delaying tactics, oh my!
“What basis is there for optimism? They’re communists! Nothing in their ideology eschews cheating, lying or any form of deceit.”
Of course. But the status quo changed with Trump’s willingness to levy tariffs and the sputtering performance of the Chinese economy over the last year. I’m not suggesting that everything will go forward ideally or perfectly, but the Chinese *are*, in fact, acting differently.
Trump is the factor, here.
MBunge on January 16, 2020 at 3:36 pm said:
Who knows if China will actually live up to this. I will say that no matter what else has or may happen, President Trump deserves enormous credit for altering the public discussion on three things: trade, war, and immigration. Before him, elite consensus on all three had calcified into an almost cargo-cult mentality of doing the same thing over and over and hoping for better results. Even if Trump loses in 2020, it’s going to be almost impossible to go back to that mental fail state.
* * *
If the country elects anyone from the Democratic party, the Government will immediately snap back to that mentality, because most of the Administrative State never left it. Whether they can drag the rest of the voters (including a very irate Trump/GOP base) with them is hard to know.
The point is, they “aren’t hoping for better results“: the elite & the bureaucrats & the complicit companies DID have good results, and Trump is shifting money away from their pockets into other peoples’.
Labor and environmental arbitrage. Monetary manipulation, despite claims to the contrary. Intellectual/property theft. To name a few. There is work to be done on both sides if we are to mitigate multidecadal progress.
the status quo changed with Trump’s willingness to levy tariffs
The first phase is reason to be cautiously optimistic.
Oh, and catastrophic anthropogenic global cooling… warming… change, if you believe the prophecy.
Kai Akker on January 16, 2020 at 4:23 pm said:
I believe that “created” in the Cavuto quote is a typo for cheated — the Chinese have cheated eight times since 2010.
* * *
OT rant / I noticed in my reading yesterday that almost every post (and there were dozens) that wasn’t clearly a pre-crafted essay had: one or more typos or spell-check fails; deliberate but misused individual words (most recently “jive” for “jibe” — in more than one article, in a single day, by authors who must have heard the idiom “that doesn’t jibe” but didn’t know the word, and substituted a word they DID know); idiomatic phrases (we’ve lost the background that gave them their sense); and grammatical constructions.
Especially past subjunctive conditionals: I don’t think I have seen one used correctly in years, outside of Neo’s blog and a few others.
https://grammarist.com/grammar/subjunctive-mood/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jibe
/OT rant /
Aesop, didn’t you recently point out the “report” used in a British newspaper for rapport? I like the jive for jibe, too; I would much rather jive out in the boat than jibe. An unexpected jibe is usually a flip, in fact.
I’ll bet you would much rather have enjoyed a good laugh over these mistakes than suffer through their tediousness, their obliviousness! If the case were reversed, I know that I would. Have. Would have. Might have should have.
(How were my tenses there? I did good on the verbal SAT!)
AesopFan,
Here is the one that always catches my eye, and I wonder if it is really correct. I guess it is now somewhat correct through very common misusage.
From Merriam Webster
A hone is a very specific metalworking boring tool, and by analogy it refers to getting something precisely correct through very tiny tweeks, not a wide ranging search or scan (like the missile).
It’s a good start… on the way to the CPC’s defenestration.
Short term deal that benefits US exports, money in the pockets of farmers:
Agriculture Applauds Phase One China Deal, Awaits Tariff Removal
https://www.agweb.com/article/agriculture-applauds-phase-one-china-deal-awaits-tariff-removal
Good deal for now. Phase 2 should address wheat and pork, more to come.
We should seek every reasonable trade advantage over China; but we should not cultivate a long and mutually beneficial relationship with commie slave-drivers. We don’t… or at least we shouldn’t… wish their leaders success in maintaining and growing their evil empire.
We should continue incentivizing western companies to relocate operations outside of China to its erstwhile neighbors like Vietnam:
Vietnam Is Becoming The Big Winner In The China Trade Wars
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/warrenshoulberg/2019/10/16/us-finally-succeeds-in-vietnam-as-more-companies-move-sourcing-there/amp/
We should continue denying them access to the heavy machinery required to manufacture jet engines or anything else with a potential military application:
China’s aviation industry has a steep climb to ‘Made in China 2025’ goals
https://www.scmp.com/business/article/2170746/chinas-aviation-industry-has-steep-climb-made-china-2025-goals
In addition to denying them the means to improve surveillance technological, we should make future trade agreements contingent on the regime recognizing and affirming the people’s right to the panoply of western rights:
Congress presses Trump to sanction China over human rights
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Congress-presses-Trump-to-sanction-China-over-human-rights
The people of China need reliable internet access for the same reason the people of Iran.. and we ourselves… need it: to share important information to improve the daily lives of every man, woman and child in good times and to shine a light on tyranny and disaster in bad times.
I like our current trajectory with China.
On subjunctives in grammar: take the quiz here, and see how many incorrect formulations you’ve read on the internet, and now, sadly, in printed works:
https://www.spring.edu/webroom/practice_g5_conditionals_5.html
Michael Towns,
Trump is indeed the factor, which raises the probability that unless the President who succeeds Trump is equally hard-nosed, the Chinese will revert right back to their prior methods. Lacking a moral conscience, their calculus like all the criminally inclined is… what can they get away with?
TommyJay,
A hone is also “A fine-grained whetstone for giving a keen edge to a cutting tool.” Arguably used for sharpening far more than as a bore. Grammar is not my forte but I suspect “hone in on” and “home in on” are equally valid but different in application. A “heat-seeking missile” homes in on an enemy jet’s heat exhaust. Whereas, a chess player seeks to “hone in on” his opponent’s weaknesses. The confusion lies in a greatly deteriorated ‘educational system” and humanity’s all too common tendency toward mental laziness.
“Honed” is also a type of stone finish. It is the next step down from “polished”.
I forgot that blades in wood planes are “honed.” I still think that the chess playing usage sounds incorrect to me, though very common. Again, that one is more of a searching style operation, not a miniscule tweek or adjustment.
China will cheat, steal, stall, and play for time until a new globalist regime takes back absolute power in DC.
TommyJay,
The phrase “hone in on” is yet another case, such as the substitution of “jive” for “jibe” (and of course there’s also “gibe,” but never mind), where people for at least a couple of different reasons missed the fact that what was said was actually “home in on.” From old radio lingo, as far as I know (but per M-W it’s much older than radio)*, where one would “home in on the [radio] signal” for some reason good, bad or indifferent.
Not a terribly long step from there to such phrases as “Suddenly he homed in on the truth!” but then “home in on [whatever]” became “hone in on [whatever],” and now here we all are.
*Merriam Webster:
hone
transitive verb
1 : to sharpen or smooth with a whetstone
2 : to make more acute, intense, or effective : [as, for example], “helped her hone her comic timing”— Patricia Bosworth
By the way, M-W also has a discussion of what it believes to be the history and use of the two words, in which it makes what is to me a seriously unconvincing argument that “to hone in on” can be interpreted so as to give the same meaning as “to home in on.”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/home-in-or-hone-in
Tommy, the chess usage is still wrong unless you assume that “to hone” can be used as if it were “to recognize” or “to notice.” But would you say, “Fischer recognized in on his opponent’s unfortunate move and took advantage of it” or “Fischer noticed in on his opponent’s unfortunate move and took advantage of it”?
. . .
Aesop, thanks for the link to the Grammarian. A good refresher. :>))
Two things make for more optimism than before.
1. Trump an always raise the tariffs. There would have been no deal without the stress on the Chinese markets that the tariffs created.
2. This is a bilateral deal. That’s big. Previously we had to go to the WTO to complain about China’s cheating. That took years and the punishments handed down were mostly not really hurting China. According to Steve Mnuchin, this deal has an enforcement mechanism with both countries establishing an office of enforcement where problems will be dealt with promptly as they arise. Maybe the Chinese will still try to cheat and stall, but I think the threat of tariffs and other economic actions may help keep them in line. A year from now we’ll have a better idea of how it’s working.
The discussions about grammar reminds me of an old joke.
A Tennessee girl gets a scholarship to an Ivy League university. At a new student orientation she asks a girl from Massachusetts “Where are you from?” The girl from Massachusetts replies, “Where I am from we never end a sentence with a preposition.” The Tennessee girl responds, “Ok, so where are you from, bitch.”
Many of us in flyover country may lack proper grammar, but we say what we mean and we mean what we say, and we understand one another perfectly.
As to the China Phase 1, in the past week or so I heard two ideas on FOX Business News that caught my attention. I wasn’t quick enough to note who said each because FOX only puts the name on the screen for a short time. (Neither was Gordon Chang or Pillsbury.) I thought them worth thinking about.
One, China has gotten to the point where they are more and more involved in developing a lot of their own patentable ideas, and thus have more interest now in the protection of international patent rights.
Two, Trump has shown the strength of the utilization of tariffs for a wide range of possibilities, and the Chinese are growing more leery of the possibility of the Left using tariffs to achieve “Climate Change” goals. Trump won’t, because he knows the AGW/”Climate Change” issue is a fraud.
On the other topic, a phrase I have always wondered about is “made out of whole cloth” (meaning “totally false”)—I think it may be more meaningfully thought of as “made out of hole cloth” because, for instance, there is no cloth in the neck and arm-holes of a garment. Something made of hole cloth would be created out of nothing. The image amuses me.
@parker:
The “never end a sentence with a preposition” and “never split an infinitive” rules of grammar come from 18th-century pedants who thought Latin grammar was perfect and English should work just like it.
In fact, ending sentences with prepositions and splitting infinitives work just fine in English to convey meaning and have done so for centuries, and therefore are “proper” grammar.
Bryan and parker: or as Churchill allegedly said, “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”
PS Emphasis on allegedly, but that doesn’t change the joke.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-preposition/