【英文】哈德逊研究所报告：美国应如何应对中国的经济脱钩（109页）

英文研究报告 2022年09月05日 07:46 管理员

The CCP was acutely aware of Chinese dependence on the US and other advanced economies through imports and joint ventures with these foreign firms. One estimate is that about 80 percent of private sector research and development money spent in China in 2015—about USD 44 billion out of USD 55 billion—was spent by multinationals.101 The Trump administration was already signaling that this was an increasingly unacceptable situation because it would help China emerge as the global leader in innovation and know-how. Therefore, US attempts to identify and capture a larger share of the supply and value chain across a growing number of emerging and enabling technologies and sectors and to deny these to China was only going to accelerate. Indeed, Beijing realized that game-plan was already in play. An analysis of tariffs levied against Chinese goods by the Trump White House under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 revealed that 80 percent (by value) of the targeted trade with China was in industries identified as “patent-intensive” by the Department of Commerce.102 These include computer/electronic products and machinery/equipment, which constitute about 30 percent and 22 percent, respectively, of Chinese exports to the US.

One of the justifications the US offered was that these are the industries that China heavily targets for forced transfers and IP theft. In addition to targeting Chinese-based firms in these high-value-creating and patent-intensive industries, the tariffs seem designed to make it less commercially attractive for foreign firms to invest or engage in joint or cooperative ventures with local firms to produce high-value-creating intermediate parts in China. These two broad sectors (computer/electronic products and machinery/equipment) are prominent in integrated regional and global supply chains. Moreover, approximately one-third of all Chinese exports of these products to the US are directly related to the business operations of America-based firms.104 In other words, around one-third form part of the current supply chain for America-based firms. Further analysis reveals that around two-thirds of these industries’ products imported from China to the US are produced by foreign-invested firms based in China. This is significant because, in theory, these firms do not have to base operations in China. In addition to concerns about IP transfers and theft, tariffs levied on China-based firms make it commercially less attractive for foreign-invested firms to base operations in China when the next or end destination for their product is the US. The idea is to minimize Chinese involvement—and therefore learning—in prized supply and value chains in certain sectors.