American multinational corporations and the U.S.-China trade war

Jiakun Jack Zhang

Chapter 13 in Research Handbook on Trade Wars, 2022, pp 252-270 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter examines the role of interest group politics in shaping the Trump administration's trade war with China. It explores how China's integration into the global trading system in the 2000s created political backlash in both China and the United States, stoking the embers of economic nationalism in both countries. In China this political backlash caused the government to embrace indigenous innovation. In the United States, it meant that trade with China would be framed increasingly as a national security rather than economic issue. The confluence of these trends helps explain why American MNCs, which worked so hard in the 1990s for China's accession to the WTO and are largest stakeholders in the U.S.-China relationship, have not only failed to constrain the escalation of tariffs but actually contributed to the decision to start the trade war. Ambivalent distributive politics among MNCs coupled with ideological convergence in Congress towards "getting tough on China" both contributed to the collective action failure that created the U.S.-China trade war.

Keywords: Asian Studies; Economics and Finance; Geography; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781839105692/9781839105692.00023.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19694_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().