Between the lines
The emergence of China as a ‘trade adversary’ in the USTR documents, 2001-2016
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31990/agenda.2020.3.2Keywords:
Trade Policy, United States, China, Trade WarAbstract
In this paper, we examine how the United States Trade Representative (USTR) framed China in his reports between 2001 and 2016. The hypothesis is that the USTR stopped perceiving China as a “regular state” and began to perceive it as an “adversary state”, and the turning point was between 2003 and 2005 under George W Bush’s administration. We use content analysis to test the hypothesis in two documents: The President’s Trade Policy Agenda; and the Special 301 Report. We observed that since the period of 2003 to 2005 the mentions to China has gone from a normal level to an extraordinary level and the USTR’s speech began to characterize China in a more negative way, announcing the use of “all available tools” to respond to the unfair Chinese trade practices. We concluded that there is empirical support for the hypothesis and that the perception of China as a trade adversary of the United States has a strong bureaucratic root.
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