With free trade under fire from the incoming administration and under question from many other quarters, it is U.S. trade relations with China and Mexico that have been getting the most attention and criticism. That makes sense, given that those are two of this country’s three biggest trading partners — and the third is Canada, which is hard to get worked up about.
Although China and Mexico both trade a lot with the U.S., and have both been running significant trade surpluses with the U.S. for decades, that’s where the similarity ends. The China-U.S. trade relationship is spectacularly unbalanced, with a gap between goods exports and imports that exploded not long after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and that, while it has subsided a bit since last year, is still of a scale never seen before “Chimerica” came into being.