The 245 percent tariffs President Donald Trump put on China are “unlikely to achieve his goal of returning manufacturing jobs to the United States,” wrote Dr. Moira Weigel in a New York Times guest essay Thursday.
And instead, they're earning him praise for championing the nation.
The Harvard University assistant professor trained as a merchant a year ago in an Amazon center in Hangzhou — and she's hearing praise from the people she met there.
They believe the tariffs “will force Americans to pay more for the same prosaic goods they’ve always gotten from Amazon," she wrote.
"They will also push the Chinese Amazon ecosystem to broaden its horizons and, in doing so, strengthen China’s economic power throughout the world.”
Weigel penned that Amazon, where a lot of Americans purchase things, “is as much a Chinese company as an American one.” This is because “more than half of [Amazon’s] top sellers are in China, and the fees these third-party sellers pay to use Amazon’s marketplace are one of its largest sources of revenue.”
She noted other experts “dismiss the idea that the tariffs will help bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.”
The author added, “the tariffs create a strong incentive for Chinese sellers to try to sell their goods elsewhere,” something Weigel claims the Chinese government has been “calling on businesses to do.”
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“In China, one of many nicknames for President Trump is Chuan Jianguo. ‘Trump the Nation Builder,’” Weigel recalled of her most recent trip to China. “My best translation is ‘Comrade Trump.’ The joke is that Mr. Trump is a patriotic son of China who is diligently advancing Chinese interests by causing chaos in the United States.
“So perhaps it makes sense that so many merchants seem to admire Mr. Trump as a businessman, if not as a leader.”
However, another Chinese source told the author they believe, “the fondness for Mr. Trump is mostly a joke. But many share a sense that, however painful they may be in the short term, the tariffs will eventually spur China to assume its rightful place as the world’s leader and the beacon of a new phase of globalization that’s no longer centered on America.”