US Trade Representative says 25 years of efforts to change China’s economy only made things worse

For a quarter century, Washington sent its sharpest economic minds to convince Beijing that China should consume more and export less. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has a succinct verdict on that entire project: it didn’t work. “We did that for 25 years with our best people, and everything got worse,” Greer told Axios, referring to the bipartisan consensus that once held China could be nudged toward a consumption-driven economy. The implication is clear. The US has mostly stopped trying. From persuasion to pragmatism The shift represents one of the most significant US trade policy pivots in recent memory. Rather than attempting to fundamentally reshape China’s economic architecture, the Trump administration is pursuing what amounts to managed trade: specific, transactional deals with measurable deliverables. The centerpiece of this new approach is a US-China Board of Trade, established to identify roughly $30 billion in goods from each side that could qualify for tariff reductions on non-sensitive products. One early deliverable is soybeans. China committed to purchasing 25 million metric tons of US soybeans annually through the end of Trump’s term. By mid-August, Beijing ...