You are so clueless! You won't believe it but American BUSINESSES are running a surplus with China!
China ran a $376bn trade surplus against the US in 2017 when you look at imports vs exports. US goods exports to China are worth only a quarter of US imports from China.
However, these numbers do not capture the true size of US business interest in China. They are at odds with the fact, for example, that Chinese consumers own more active iPhones and buy more General Motor cars than US consumers do. These cars and phones are sold to China not through US exports, but through Chinese subsidiaries of US multinational enterprises.
The bilateral trade balance is misleading because (1) it does not capture the sales of goods and services by foreign firms' local subsidiaries (the FDI channel); and (2) countries such as Japan and Korea have large businesses in China that export to the US.
Our March 25 report corrected for these biases and found that US firms sold $372bn of goods and services to China in 2015, while Chinese firms sold $403bn to the US. The net balance, which we defined as "aggregate sales balance", is a surplus of $30bn from China's perspective, much smaller than the $367bn bilateral trade balance.
We estimate that from the US perspective, this balance has turned from a deficit of $30bn in 2015 to a SURPLUS of $7bn in 2016 and $20bn in 2017.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...WMAN6BAgAEAE&usg=AOvVaw2EJnKhmIvwcB04cPaeEGX-
And we could be in big trouble if we push the Chinese too far:
However, as bilateral trade tensions escalate, the large US corporate presence in China could become a critical vulnerability. As previous political spats between China and trade partners such as Japan and South Korea flared, Chinese consumers expressed their ire with retail boycotts against Japanese and Korean goods.
So far, Beijing has reined in the reaction from its state-run media even as Washington has launched fusillades of outrage. But on Tuesday such restraint appeared to slip. China???s commerce ministry complained of blackmail after Mr Trump's issued instructions to prepare tariffs on a further $200bn of Chinese exports.
If the US suffers a loss of rationality and issues a (tariff) list, China will have to adopt strong countermeasures, which will be comprehensive measures combining quantity and quality, the ministry said in a statement.
The worry now for US companies operating in China is that Beijing may respond not only with formal trade measures but also through an informal nationalist backlash. Much of China's leverage over US companies in China such as GM, Ford, Starbucks, Nike and others can be enacted informally, said Mr Wolf.
If the US is portrayed as having hurt the feelings of the Chinese people in the Chinese media, then you could see the sales of these companies getting hit not by official regulatory action but by consumer boycotts, he added.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...-T5esjdL8brzBoDvXLUh&cf=1&cshid=1560891397881
Your head is in the sand. This problem is well known.
