Justified countermeasures to ‘coercive’ practices

Some US lawmakers have recently accused Beijing of using “coercive economic practices” to achieve worldwide dominance over the United States.

These accusations were reiterated at a hearing of the US House of Representatives days after US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wrapped up her trip to Beijing to discuss the nations’ economic relations. Witnesses testified the environment in China is becoming increasingly “restrictive” for US entities.

It is these US lawmakers that have played key roles over the past few years in getting more than 1,300 Chinese entities on various US blacklists. Yet despite such attempts, US investment in and trade with China has maintained stable growth. The affected US companies have never ceased trying to persuade Washington to weigh the country’s losses against the gains, and expressed their confidence in the Chinese market by continuing to expand their operations and increase their investment in China.

However, the US politicians, who are gripped with an anti-China frenzy, continue to regard the long-term systematic attack on Chinese enterprises in the high-tech sector as necessary. They continue to ignore the fact that, while the US government and legislature are trying to demarcate more and more fields as forbidden zones for Chinese companies’ operations in the US and dramatically increase the bureaucratic hurdles for them and their US partners, China is doing the opposite, welcoming companies from around the world to the country and granting them equal treatment.

As a matter of fact, most examples the US lawmakers provided in the recent hearing on China’s alleged “coercive economic practices” are nothing but countermeasures the Chinese side has been forced to take to safeguard its core interests against the US’ provocations, ranging from sanctioning the few US companies selling weapons to secessionists on the Taiwan island to its latest anti-dumping investigation into imported propionic acid originating in the US announced on Friday.

The anti-dumping probe into the US propionic acid that was launched on the same day was in response to the US House of Representatives’ Thursday banning of releases of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve from being exported to China.

China’s welcome to foreign companies and investment is heartfelt and that should be evident to the whole world. Foreign direct investment in China increased 5 percent year-on-year to a record $189.1 billion in 2022. From January to June this year, 24,000 new foreign-invested enterprises were established nationwide, an increase of 35.7 percent year-on-year, and investment in high-tech industries increased by 7.9 percent.

It is suggested that the US politicians stop dismantling the foundations of Sino-US relations, and accept that the US has to co-exist with China.

Editorial, China Daily