By Jeffrey D. Sachs
China’s economy is slowing down. Current forecasts put China’s GDP growth in 2023 at less than 5%, far below the high growth rates that China enjoyed until the late 2010s. The Western press is filled with China’s supposed misdeeds: a financial crisis in the real-estate market, a general overhang of debt, and other ills. Yet much of the slowdown results from US policies that aim to slow China’s growth.
The anti-China policies come out of a familiar playbook of US policy-making. The aim is to prevent economic and technological competition from a major rival. The first and most obvious application of this playbook was the technology blockade that the US imposed on the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
The second application of the playbook is less obvious, and in fact, is generally overlooked even by knowledgeable observers. At the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, the US deliberately sought to slow Japan’s economic growth. Japanese firms were outcompeting US firms in key sectors, including semiconductors, consumer electronics, and automobiles.
