Trump’s approach to tariffs has drawn widespread criticism, sparking a debate in which partisans have made all sorts of claims and counter-claims. This briefing sets the record straight on 10 important points of fact.

China
It’s time for all parties—left, right, and center—to focus on the most important thing vis-à-vis Chinese trade policy: rolling back the unfair, mercantilist policies underlying the “Made in China, 2025” strategy. Everything else is just a sideshow writes Rob Atkinson in Innovation Files.
Foreign predatory economic practices harm the U.S. economy. In testimony before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, Rob Atkinson outlines how the U.S. government should respond.
In an op-ed for RealClearPolicy, ITIF’s Stephen Ezell outlines ten alternatives to tariffs that would roll back China’s unfair trade practices.
In commentary for Fortune Magazine, ITIF President Rob Atkinson and Michael Lind write that America’s own antitrust policies perversely encourage the loss of technological leadership to rival nations.
In an article for National Review, ITIF President Rob Atkinson decodes the true meaning behind the official statements from the Chinese government in response to President Trump’s long-anticipated announcement of tough new actions against China’s mercantilist trade and economic policies.
Raising the cost of ICT products by levying tariffs on ICT imports from China would reduce growth in U.S. ICT investments, which would lower productivity growth, and thus economic growth.
In testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, ITIF Director of Telecom Policy Doug Brake encouraged the continued reliance on the competitive private sector to deploy 5G networks and address supply chain security concerns through ongoing review as a component of a broader strategy to guide China to a rule-of-law, market driven framework on trade and intellectual property.
The problem is not that Trump imposed tariffs; it is that he appears to have be motivated purely by a protectionist instinct, not because he recognized a legitimate need to aggressively confront foreign mercantilism, particularly on the part of the world’s worst offender, China.
The innovation mercantilist policies which lie at the heart of China’s model of state-led capitalism have been the central force driving this overcapacity across an ever-growing number of industries.
Perhaps it’s the natural human aversion to bad news—sometimes known as the “ostrich effect”—but few opinion leaders on U.S. economic policy appear willing to take a cold, hard look at the state of U.S. manufacturing. If they did, they wouldn’t be happy.
Brazil, China, Indonesia, Russia, and Vietnam fielded some of the year’s worst innovation mercantilist policies. Their targets included Internet-based services, electric vehicles, biopharmaceuticals, computers and electronics.
Xiaomi wants to join a growing list of companies—including Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, Lenovo, and ZTE—that are gaining market share, not just in China, but globally. They would enjoy considerably less success if not for the Chinese government’s campaign of innovation mercantilism.
Most private investors don’t have the deep pockets and patience to wait for clean, cheap energy technologies to mature. We need smart public policy to solve the problem.
Rob Atkinson discusses China’s global leadership and the threat it poses to the U.S. on Bloomberg Markets.
China’s objective is to become competitive across virtually all advanced-technology industries—and the techniques it is using pose a direct, and even existential, threat to high-tech industries in the United States and other countries.
After China acceded to the WTO, the trade-creation impact accounted for four-fifths of its manufacturing productivity growth in the next six years, writes John Wu in Innovation Files.
When China implemented an investment tax credit, businesses increased investment by 8.8 percent and productivity by 3.7 percent, writes John Wu in Innovation Files.
State-owned Chinese firms receive up to four times more R&D subsidies but are less innovative than private Chinese firms, writes John Wu in Innovation Files
WASHINGTON—The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the top-ranked U.S. science- and tech-policy think tank, today released the following statement from Robert D. Atkinson, ITIF’s president, on the Trump administration’s U.S.-China trade announcement.
ITIF submitted comments to the Chinese State Internet Information Office on a draft circular that covered requirements for the handling of personal and other important data.
China is flouting global rules and norms governing trade and economic policy—threatening the U.S. economy and its advanced-technology industries, as well as the entire global economy—and it’s time for a new response, testified ITIF before a U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee.
This week’s meeting between Presidents Trump and Xi provides the American president an opportunity to reset a U.S.-China trade and economic relationship that has become severely unbalanced, writes Stephen Ezell in The Hill.
Of all the issues that will be on the table when President Trump hosts Chinese President Xi Jinping this week at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, none is more important for the U.S. and global economies than China’s mercantilist campaign to dominate advanced industries by flouting the rules of the international trading system, writes Rob Atkinson in the Washington Post.