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- In addition to Crouching Tiger, Peter Navarro, President Donald Trump's “tariff master”, is worth revisiting his old book Death by China.
Prior to his political career, Navarro was a professor at the University of California, Irvine's School of Business, where he taught economics and public policy for more than twenty years. Although he did not come from China studies, he was most concerned about China. In addition to teaching, he has a long history of involvement in public policy consulting and party politics. In the 1970s, Navarro served as a policy analyst for the Massachusetts Energy Office and the U.S. Department of Energy, and in the 1990s, he ran for public office three times as a Democrat, including as mayor and a member of the local legislature, but lost all of them. It was not until his writings were recognized by Donald Trump that he became the man of the hour.
In mainstream academia, Navarro has always been regarded as an anomaly, and is generally not recognized as a rank insider in American China studies circles. But it is precisely this status of being ostracized by the mainstream that appeals to Trump's appetite. The main reason for Navarro's controversy is that the image of China that he has portrayed in his writings is very flat, monolithic, and almost entirely negative, contrary to the main theme of the United States' embrace of China over the past few decades.
The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought, How They Can Be Won, published in 2006, is Navarro's macro-level description of China's ambitions: he sees China as an emerging power that is expanding its influence abroad in order to capture the global market for commodities trade. He believes that China, as an emerging power, will continue to expand its influence overseas in order to seize the global commodity trade market, which will inevitably challenge the established international pattern and distribution of interests; and that China will come into conflict with powers with vested interests in the areas of intellectual property protection, resource and energy development, and environmental governance, with various kinds of conflicts coming up one after another. Navarro's views are basically the “China Threat Theory” prevalent in Western academia, with no unique features and no special attention.
The book that made Navarro famous and became the representative of US hawkishness towards China was the one he published with another economist Greg Autry in 2011: Death by China: Confronting the Dragon-A Global Call to Action. Action.) The book returns to economic and trade policy, Navarro's personal specialty, and with some data to back it up, Navarro takes a much stronger stand, criticizing China's unfair pursuit of economic advantage over the U.S., calling it a “Weapons of Job Destruction” that is strangling the U.S. economy. The future of the U.S. economy. The book details the “sins” of China's economic policies:
- Export subsidies and import restrictions that violate WTO rules;
- The grossly distorted exchange rate of the Renminbi;
- Theft of U.S. intellectual property and trade secrets;
- Cost-cutting through production methods that damage the environment and squeeze labor welfare;
- Price interventions and access restrictions that discriminate against foreign capital.
Navarro believes that China has systematically taken jobs in the U.S. manufacturing sector through these policies, and that the latter is the key to supporting the U.S. middle class, and that if China wins, it will be the “death of Chinese manufacturing” for the United States. Therefore, Navarro publicly called on U.S. consumers to reject “Made in China” goods, and suggested that the U.S. government pass a bill to retaliate against China's unfair trade practices, arrest Chinese commercial spies, and restrict Chinese capital from entering the U.S. market, among other things.
Navarro's proposals ran completely counter to Obama's mainstream thinking during his tenure: liberal economic theory, and a foreign policy that advocated deepening economic and trade cooperation between China and the United States to achieve a “win-win” situation, and for a while he was regarded as a heretic. However, he was happy to be recognized as such, and even made a documentary film of the same name on the contents of his writings.
