Did the Chinese learn their trade antics from the U.S.?

The China/U.S. trade war heats up. The rest of us get dragged along willy-nilly. Nonetheless, there is a lot of sympathy for the American case. The Chinese have hardly walked their talk about being free traders. Ont the contrary, they have engaged in a number of nefarious trade practices. They have demanded technology transfers from foreign companies or harassed them, subsidized their own industries, exploited their cheap labour, erected trade barriers, and almost certainly spied on foreign firms to steal technology.

So what else is new? Countries who are industrializing have always engaged in a range of protective measures to protect their industries until they are competitive. And only then do they become advocates of trade. The British, for example, conquered foreign lands to provide both cheap resources for their industries and guaranteed markets for their products. And used the British Navy to prevent interference.

But while the British pioneered the strategy of protecting developing industry, the United States most ardently applied it. Economic historian Paul Bairoch referred to the U.S. as "the homeland and bastion of modern protectionism." During the latter part of the 19th century, U.S. tariffs were the highest in the world, much higher than other industrial countries.

Furthermore, the U.S. limited patent protection to their own citizens, in effect allowing American entrepreneurs to steal the inventions of foreigners. This is ironic considering that when the U.S. negotiates a trade agreement today, it tends to give its highest priority to protecting intellectual property.

And as for stealing technology, the Americans were pretty good at that, too. The British had laws against sneaking machine designs out of the country; nonetheless, American entrepreneurs advertised publicly for skilled Brits who would take the risk. The U.S. government even offered bounties to sellers of trade secrets.

The Americans enjoyed a major coup when a young Brit with an exceptional knowledge of mechanized spinning, Samuel Slater, emigrated under a false name to join an American firm. With his new partners he created a thread-making empire. President Andrew Jackson referred to Slater as the father of the American industrial revolution. To the British he was "Slater the Traitor."

The Chinese today are simply aping the antics of the Americans of the 19th century and stealing all the technology they can to catch up to their major rival. When the U.S. and other Western nations criticize developing countries for protectionism, they are exhibiting no small amount of hypocrisy, in effect saying that's how we did it but we aren't about to let you follow in our footsteps. The Chinese, it appears, have other ideas.