Why Federalism: On the Role of China
- Benjamin Studebaker
- Oct 11
- 20 min read
Proposals for a federal union typically operate on the premise that the members are meant to be committed to political pluralism, to competitive multiparty democracy. China remains a one-party state. But over the last half century, China has been heavily integrated into the system of world trade. This economic integration would be extremely costly to reverse. Yet it is also quite challenging to construct a supranational federal republic (SFR) that can meaningfully shape commercial competition if it cannot politically include key trading partner. The question of how to deal with China has been put off again and again, as federalists hope economic integration will produce political integration – that trading with China will, eventually, cause China to embrace democratic reforms. The effect of this has been to delay any serious attempt to organize for a federal union. These delays have allowed global trade to remain poorly governed, and this poor government has generated resentment and mistrust of global and international institutions. The waiting has not produced a democratic China. Instead, it has produced democratic publics that lack commitment even to internationalism, much less to anything supranational. Instead of producing a positive development in China, it is producing regression elsewhere.
But the future has not yet been written. As I write, the United States and China still carry out an enormous amount of trade with one another. No war has broken out between the two states, and there are still considerable social relations between American and Chinese individuals, corporations, and social organizations. There may still be time to organize for a political alternative, but only if we recognize that it is necessary to consider what it would mean to pursue a federal union in a context in which China remains a one-party state.
Without China, an SFR risks finding itself stuck in security and commercial competition with a Chinese-led bloc. Such an SFR would fail to be meaningfully supranational. It would become a vehicle for interstate competition instead of the means by which such competition might be qualified. An SFR constituted by a new Cold War is hardly worthy of its name.
The Unavoidability of China
In the 1930s, Clarence Streit proposed a supranational federal union beginning with fifteen leading democracies:
1. The American Union
2. The United Kingdom
3. The Federal Dominion of Canada
4. The Commonwealth of Australia
5. New Zealand
6. The Union of South Africa
7. Ireland
8. The French Republic
9. Belgium
10. The Netherlands
11. The Swiss Confederation
12. Denmark
13. Norway
14. Sweden
15. Finland
At the time, Streit was able to say that this nucleus was large enough to give his supranational federal union the ability to regulate global trade. As he put it:
“Together these fifteen own almost half the earth, rule all its oceans, govern nearly half mankind. They do two-thirds of the world's trade, and most of this would be called their domestic trade once they united, for it is among themselves. They have more than 50 per cent control of nearly every essential material. They have more than 60 per cent control of such war essentials as oil, copper, lead, steel, iron, coal, tin, cotton, wool, wood pulp, shipping tonnage. They have almost complete control of such keys as nickel, rubber and automobile production. They possess practically all the world's gold and banked wealth. Their existing armed strength is such that once they united it they could radically reduce their armaments and yet gain a two-power standard of armed superiority over the powers whose aggression any of them now fears. The Union's existing and potential power from the outset would be so gigantic, its bulk so vast, its vital centers so scattered, that Germany, Italy and Japan even put together could no more dream of attacking it than Mexico dreams of invading the American Union now. Once established the Union's superiority in power would be constantly increasing simply through the admission to it of outside nations. A number would no doubt be admitted immediately. By this process the absolutist powers would constantly become weaker and more isolated.”[1]
Today, however, things look very different. Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands have lost their dependencies. Birth rates in these democracies have slowed relative to the world average, and they now are home to less than 10% of the world’s population. As other states have industrialized and joined post-war institutions, the fifteen have also come to account for a smaller share of world trade – roughly 30%.[2] Many essential materials are now mined or drilled elsewhere.
Some of the trade is accounted for by other wealthy countries that democratized after World War II. Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia, and South Korea would add another 22%, bringing the total to just over half. In the 1990s, there was some talk of an expanded nucleus that would incorporate these states.[3] But even if we included all of these territories in our nucleus, this would still leave us with a rough parity in trade volume between those territories in the union and those outside it.
The reduction in the rich countries’ share of global trade is often hailed by international organizations like the United Nations as evidence of poverty reduction. But this poverty reduction is not without political costs. A larger number of independent states with substantial economic leverage makes international coordination much more difficult. It is a substantial additional obstacle to supranational federation.
During the 30s, Streit’s nucleus of democracies traded primarily with each other. But now that the European states have lost their empires, the rich democracies increasingly trade with independent states in the developing world. Some of these independent states have competitive multiparty elections, but many of them do not. They attract business in part by offering firms access to cheap labor, low taxes, and a lax regulatory environment. Over time, this offshoring has led to persistent underconsumption in the developing world (and even in some export-driven developed states, such as Germany and Japan).[4] It has also produced excessive indebtedness in many rich democracies, including the United States, the UK, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece. These countries underproduce relative to what they consume.
Most importantly, China now accounts for 12.5% of world trade and 17% of world population. It is the leading import partner for the US, UK, Australia, Germany, Greece, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea.[5] This has enormous consequences for the possibility of federal union. Either an SFR must be constructed without China – at great economic cost – or a way must be found to incorporate China despite its divergent political procedures.
Federal Union without China
If an SFR is constructed without China, there will be no mechanism for politically governing the trade that occurs with the largest trade partner of several of the member states. The SFR creates new cooperative possibilities by creating a set of cataracts – a set of policy choke points through which competition on taxes, wages, and regulations can be qualified.[6] If the SFR conducts a large amount of trade with an external state that is not subject to the cataracts, those cataracts will be continuously undermined.
If China is politically excluded from the SFR, could it nonetheless be persuaded to conform with the SFR’s economic policies? China would, understandably, be unlikely at this stage to agree to submit to rules over which it has no political influence. To get China to agree, it would be necessary to exert economic pressure through a credible threat of economic decoupling.
Rapid economic decoupling damages economic growth, and weak economic growth makes it difficult for incumbents to get re-elected. So, while the SFR could in principle embark upon a policy of rapid decoupling, it is unlikely to be able to sustain that policy politically. While China might pay a higher price, economically, for rapid decoupling, democratically elected leaders seem much more likely to pay a high political price. For individual politicians, the political costs are much more important – because they are potentially career-ending – than any purely economic analysis of the long-term effects of decoupling. Chinese leaders understand the political pressures democratically elected leaders face. They are unlikely to view the threat of rapid decoupling as politically credible.
It would be easier to legitimate rapid decoupling if it appeared to be necessitated by events, by some kind of emergency. If there were war in the Pacific – if China were to invade Taiwan, or if war were to break out in the South China Sea – that crisis could be used to facilitate rapid decoupling. But the whole point of an SFR is avoid regressing into security competition. If the construction of an SFR requires war, it requires the very thing it’s meant to prevent.
Alternatively, the SFR could pursue a policy of gradual decoupling, by slowly raising trade barriers and repeatedly destabilizing the economic relationship in mild to moderate ways. But this is unlikely to force China, all at once, to adopt any set of rules. The disruption China would periodically experience would be mild to moderate. While the near-term costs would be lower for the SFR, they would also be lower for China. And because gradual decoupling would take a long time, it would give China an interval in which to prepare for the possibility of economic exclusion. During that interval, China would likely come to view the SFR as a geopolitical adversary. Gradual decoupling is unlikely to result in a grand bargain. It is more likely to result in a new Cold War.
Gradual decoupling may create additional problems. Rather than boosting internal trade within the SFR, it could merely shift commerce from China to other developing countries competing on lower taxes, wages, and regulatory standards. An SFR that decouples from China and becomes reliant on a different network of developing states would then face the same dilemma with regard to these states that it faces with China.
Some of these developing states could be politically included in the SFR. Developing states like Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, and Thailand have competitive multiparty elections and would be easier, at least individually, to include in a democratic SFR than a one-party state like China. But this would further increase the number of states that would need to be politically included. A larger number of discrete players with meaningful leverage increases the number of potential conflicts requiring political mediation, thus creating more opportunities for gridlock. It would also exacerbate internal economic inequality within the SFR.
The citizens of the developing democratic states would likely demand sizable transfers in exchange for complying with common rules on taxes, wages, and regulations. At the same time, the citizens of the rich democracies would be unlikely to agree easily to large transfers. Even in cases where common rules benefit all parties, there is often a desire on the part of individual players to get the best possible terms. The more decisionmakers are involved, the more likely it is that some of the decisionmakers will miscalculate or engage in risky negotiating tactics. As I proposed in the second piece in our series, the SFR avoids complaints about transfers in large part by distributing its revenues locally, to the free cities and counties nearest to the places where economic growth is generated. But this becomes harder to do, politically, when some of the states of the SFR have a per capita income that is multiple times larger than the others.
Chanchal Kumar Sharma makes the compelling case that the more economic inequality there is within a federal system, the more secessionism we are likely to see.[7] This can, in principle, be managed, if there is a moderate equalization policy along with a moderate level of autonomy for member states. But it’s difficult to sustain this moderation across time, and the larger the initial inequalities are, the harder it is, in practice, to find a golden mean. That said, Sharma studies federalism within nation-states. An SFR confers additional benefits that cannot be realized at the national level – the prevention of war, the managing of planetary crises related to technology and the environment. These benefits generate additional reasons to federate that one might think would, in principle, reduce the tendency to demand (or to oppose) large transfers between rich and poor regions. Still, the more distinct players we have at the start, and the larger the inequalities among them, the larger the chance that the creation of an SFR is held up or even thwarted by transfer disputes.
There are also radical differences in social structure between the developing democracies and the rich democracies. In the rich democracies, there is a rough parity in society between college graduates and non-graduates. Across the OECD, 40% of citizens attain some kind of tertiary degree.[8] But this number is much lower elsewhere – it’s just over 30% in Chile, 20% in Brazil and Mexico, 18% in China, and just 13% in Indonesia and India.
The rough parity in the rich democracies produces a tension between a college-educated 40% that tends to endorse the epistemic claims of technocrats and a less regularly participatory 60% that tends to be skeptical of technocratic claims to expertise. The tension between the two epistemologies results in a tendency toward what Carlo Acceti and Chris Bickerton calls “technopopulism” – a tendency for technocratic governance to be laundered through populism, and for populism to provide a cover for technocratic arrangements that enjoy limited public support.[9] Over time, this opaque, deceptive politics generates resentment and suspicion, undermining trust, especially in the international and global institutions furthest from democratic reach.
In the previous post, I proposed to deal with this reality by confronting it explicitly at the level of the institutions of the SFR. The decisions of the SFR must pass through two chambers –a “Chamber of Labor” that consists exclusively of those in employment who have attained a level of education possessed by at least 2/3rds of the electorate, and a “Chamber of Status” that consists exclusively of those who have rare kinds of education possessed by less than 1/3rd of the electorate. The function of this division would be to put the part of the population inclined toward technocratic management and the part of the population that mistrusts technocratic management explicitly into political mediation.
This kind of mechanism becomes harder to design and operate if we incorporate territories with sharply different levels of educational attainment and where the particular social problems that have arisen in the rich democracies are absent. Instead, the SFR would be bisected principally by level of economic development. The primary divide would be between the rich countries and the developing countries. This is highly visible if we look at, for instance, final consumption per capita. The United States consumes around $43,000 per head, the UK roughly $25,000, Japan around $20,000, Chile around $15,000, Brazil around $9,000, China around $7,000, and India less than $5,000.[10] It might seem necessary to assign the citizens of the high-consumption and low-consumption territories their own legislative chambers. A “Chamber of Consumers” might consist of those who live in territories that support more than $20,000 per head in consumption, while a “Chamber of Producers” might consist of those who live in territories beneath that level. Gradually, over time, the set of territories in the Chamber of Producers might be diminished, until the need for a bicameral split dissipates – or it becomes possible to redraw the bicameral distinction on a new basis.
Without this structure, we would face significant disputes over how to distribute seats in a single legislative chamber. These disagreements would obscure the deeper conflict — debates about whether to allocate seats based on population would essentially reflect the underlying tension over whether high-population, low-income regions should have more representation than low-population, high-income regions.
And yet, once we concede to the idea that both kinds of countries need to be explicitly incorporated and that this incorporation must take precedence over attempts to mediate internal social divisions within the rich democracies, it becomes likely that those internal divisions will obstruct the formation of an SFR. The citizens of the rich democracies will lack motivation to support an SFR if they have no reason to think their interests will be substantially better represented than they are by extant international institutions.
Those institutions have run down their credibility over time in the rich democracies precisely because they have prioritized global equalization over mediating social conflict. By lowering trade barriers before an SFR was achieved, workers in rich countries were made to compete with workers in poor countries with low wages and limited rights. This competition caused jobs to move to poorer countries – like China – encouraging economic growth in them. But this competition also caused workers in the rich countries to lose ground, creating an increasingly widespread perception that economic growth is a zero-sum game. This then led workers in the rich countries to turn back toward the nation-state for protection. Consequently, social conflict within the rich democracies is overwhelming the project of global equalization, yielding a regression toward security competition. The SFR is meant to head this off, rather than reproduce it on an alternative basis. The SFR does this by qualifying forms of commercial competition. The SFR taxes mobile wealth, predistributes income through its wage policy, regulates the movement of people and pushes the adoption of best practices. By limiting the degree to which security competition and commercial competition determine our form of life, the SFR unlocks cooperative possibilities and new ways of thinking and acting that are otherwise uncompetitive and therefore appear irrational.
Federal Union with China
Why not include China from the start? The economic potential of China remains considerable. It was for this reason that President Nixon sought to cooperate with China even despite the substantial differences in the American and Chinese political systems. The incorporation of China into the nucleus of founders would substantially reduce the number of countries that would need to be included at the start, reducing the number of cats to herd. If China were committed to the cataracts from the start, it would make it much easier for the other members of the SFR to commit to free trade only with those territories that have agreed to follow the rules.
In an SFR in which the nucleus is a group of rich countries plus China, there would be no need to design the institutions principally around a consumer/producer split. China is looking to grow its internal consumer market in any case, and the cataracts could be designed to facilitate a rebalancing of the trade relationship between China and the rich democracies. This rebalancing would consist in helping China to consume more by pushing up Chinese wages. This increase in Chinese wages would invite some producers currently based to relocate. But, because these producers would only have access to the markets of the SFR if they are located within it, they would not be able to move from China to another country that offers low wages. Their choice would be to remain in China or to move to a rich democracy that currently underproduces. This would generate jobs in the rich democracies, alleviating the problem of persistent indebtedness.
By reducing the number of low-consumption territories admitted at the outset to the SFR, it could still be possible to design the SFR principally to manage social division within the rich democracies. Chinese workers would have a strong position in the Chamber of Labor, because most Chinese citizens still are not university-educated. Only 8% of Chinese citizens between the ages of 25 and 64 have a bachelor’s degree, meaning that the total number of degree-holders in China is roughly the same as the number in the United States, despite China’s much larger total population.[11] Chinese workers and workers in the rich democracies would cooperate in the Chamber of Labor to push for cataracts that raise their standard of living and create new kinds of cooperative opportunities for themselves and their descendants. In the Chamber of Status, highly-educated citizens from rich democracies would play a dominant role. They would be able to advise the Chamber of Labor and moderate any excesses.
But what about the free cities and counties? If cities and counties are to receive the revenues the SFR collects on their behalf, the effect of this is to substantially decentralize spending, giving local communities much more discretion to shape the forms of cooperation the SFR supports. In China, the party-state has been careful to avoid decentralization. Would there be considerably more resistance in China to the idea that Chinese cities and counties should be free to dispose of a substantial part of SFR revenues without having to go through the party-state centered in Beijing?
In the 90s, it was argued that China was in the process of embracing a kind of internal federalism, albeit it lacked the constitutional grounding in individual rights and popular consent characteristic of most Western models of federalism. This came to be referred to as “federalism, Chinese style.”[12] Chinese style federalism was not grounded on democratization, but instead on the credible decentralization of power. This decentralization consisted in an increase in autonomy for provincial governments, with the provinces competing with each other within a market framework. This decentralization credibly committed China to markets. It was not easy for either national or subnational governments to abandon the commitment. Nor was it easy to roll back the decentralization. When Beijing attempted to resubordinate the provincial governments, it did not have success.
It is sometimes alleged that under Xi Jinping China has become less committed to liberal reforms. But these debates tend to focus more heavily on intellectual property rights or monetary policy rather than on the degree of centralization. When the centralization question is broached, it tends to be through the prism of Hong Kong.
But many of the problems China faces today are linked to the way its peculiar form of federalism operates. Provincial governments have played a key role in the Chinese housing crisis, overinvesting in construction. China needs to find a way to transition the provinces to an alternative growth model while at the same time respecting the decentralization that keeps its commitment to markets credible. This is politically difficult in no small part because the provinces have real power – they not only resist efforts to recentralize, they also resist efforts to transition to other growth models. This leaves them trapped in an economic paradigm that has exhausted itself. [13]
China does not have enough high-paying jobs to supply enough urban residents with the income necessary to pay to live in the buildings that are being constructed. Yet the provinces continue to build. As more and more of their investment becomes non-productive, ghost cities pop up, and debt burdens balloon. The central government has looked to moderate the size of the construction sector without wrecking the wider economy. But because China is stuck competing with other states to attract jobs and investment, it has been reluctant to do this through wage increases that might drive sustainable consumer growth. Instead, China continues to focus heavily on the export market, bringing it increasingly into trade disputes.
China must boost wages and consumer spending as it reduces its reliance on construction. To do this, the central government needs the cooperation of provinces, which must pay out a larger percentage of their funds in wages. Yet the provinces have considerable ability to resist this demand and to go on making unproductive investments. And, without an SFR to qualify competition on wages, China fears a rise in wages will push down exports before a sufficient level of domestic consumption materializes.
The crisis in China looks like a crisis of excess decentralization, but only from a perspective that assumes there is no way for China to reform its economy in cooperation with the rest of the world. By participating in the SFR, China could both preserve decentralization while at the same time receiving assistance in facilitating the transition to a consumer economy.
But because China is a nation-state stuck in the competitive international system – not a part of an SFR – it lacks the capacity to meaningfully reform extant international institutions, and it has tended to try to deal with its problems through unilateral state action. This action has not been sufficient to solve the problems and it has alienated other states. In recent years, mistrust of the Chinese party-state has grown in the United States. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed this increasingly common view:
“It’s time we recognise that we need to rebuild our own supply chains even if that requires a certain level of subsidised industrial productivity. We cannot be dependent on the Chinese market. It’s not only bad for economies, it is bad for our geo-political strategic interests. Look at what happened with the lack of PPE and pharmaceutical ingredients when the pandemic hit. We were at the mercy of China. We cannot let that continue and we need to work together across the Atlantic to figure out how we are going to take back production. Now will it be as low cost? Obviously not. How do we set our tax systems so that there are incentives to return to western democracies to produce things? I would add that more and more businesses are seeing that unless they are low-cost producers of retail clothing which will probably never come back. But if they are producing anything more sophisticated, increasingly the Chinese government — through coercion, unfair regulation, enforced partnerships or royalty agreements — is slowly stealing that intellectual property anyway. So we have got to get smarter about how we deal with the economic threat. For people who say “but that disrupts the market!” — China has disrupted the market. China is not a free market economy — we tried! We let them into the WTO; we sent our businesses over there; we made trade deals. They are a controlled top-down economy. You will never compete and win against them unless you take back the means of production. It is way past due for us to do that.”[14]
The Trump administration has pursued an increasingly aggressive negotiating strategy with China in no small part because many administration officials involved in bilateral negotiations during the first Trump administration believe that Chinese negotiators do not have the backing of Beijing and are being sent to Washington to stall for time.[15] The Trump administration has embarked on this approach unilaterally, without bringing the other democracies on board. Indeed, the president has simultaneously imposed tariffs on many allied states to press them into supporting his strategy. Because the United States is not speaking on behalf of a bloc of states, its leverage in negotiations with China is less substantial than it would otherwise be. Without the backing of the other rich democracies, the administration has to achieve a large number of trade deals, not just with the United States’ traditional allies, but with many developing countries. These deals must be negotiated on an accelerated timeline, by diplomats behind closed doors, with limited public input.
It is difficult for any person to keep track of all the deals being negotiated simultaneously, let alone to synthesize them into a coherent system capable of placing the global economy on a stronger long-term footing. Governments are negotiating with only partial knowledge of the agreements other states may be pursuing. The U.S. administration hopes this uncertainty will prompt others to offer more favorable terms, fearing they might be left behind. But it may just as well cause them to adopt a more cautious approach so as to ensure they do not get the short end of the stick.
Because China knows the United States is acting unilaterally, it has more reason to doubt the credibility of the administration’s trade policy. With half a dozen Republican senators already having expressed public doubts about the trade policy, it will be difficult for the administration to sustain its tariff policy in the run-up to the midterm elections.[16] We are instead most likely to see truces between the two states, as they call each other’s bluffs and look to minimize negative economic and political effects.[17] Yet, because there is a real underlying problem in the trading relationship, these truces will struggle to hold up for long.
From the Chinese perspective, the United States seems to be repeatedly disrupting the commercial relationship in mild to moderate ways. Over time, the Chinese government may come to believe the United States aims to slowly excluding China from the international system or to degrading its position within that system. The effect of this will be to cause China to view the United States as an adversary rather than a potential cooperative partner.
Mistrust breeds mistrust. The United States must recognize that it cannot strongarm China into a new trading relationship without a serious risk of regressing into security competition. The more the United States attempts to force China into bilateral negotiations without stabilizing the commercial relationship, the more attitudes in the United States will harden against China, and the more the United States will pursue aggressive negotiating tactics. Given enough rounds of this, the result will not be a grand bargain – it will be a new Cold War.
The way to avoid this regression is to start the move toward an SFR right away and to include China in this vision from the beginning. As more time passes without a serious, organized social movement committed to bringing about an SFR, the US-China relationship deteriorates. Eventually, this deterioration will be irreversible. If an SFR must form without China, it risks becoming just another vehicle for managing security competition between two emergent blocs of states. Success in managing that competition would require it to effectively compete with China-led organizations in attracting member states from the developing world. Its institutions and procedures would be dictated by the demands of this security competition. It would no longer promote the freedom of citizens to develop new cooperative modes – it would instead exist to facilitate a project of interstate containment.
This is the path we’re currently on. If we continue down it, we will end up with something that falls far short of an SFR – at most, a Pacific equivalent of NATO. If we resign ourselves to this fate or delude ourselves into thinking that the United States can reconstitute global institutions on a unilateral basis, we will sleepwalk into a century of pain.
[1] Clarence Streit, Union Now, Harper & Brothers, 1939.
[3] See, e.g., Ira Straus, “Atlantic Federalism and the Expanding Atlantic Nucleus,” Peace & Change 24.3 (1999): 277-328.
[4] See e.g., Nita Rudra, Globalization and the Race to the Bottom in Developing Countries: Who Really Gets Hurt? Cambridge University Press, 2009; Michael Pettis and Matt Klein, Trade Wars are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace, Yale University Press, 2020; Palma Polyak, “The Silent Losers of Germany’s Export Surpluses: How Current Account Imbalances are Exacerbated by the Misrepresentation of their Domestic Costs,” Comparative European Politics, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-022-00291-8
[6] See the previous entries in our series for more extensive discussions of the institutional features of the federal system we’ve discussed:Entry 1: https://www.streitcouncil.org/post/why-federalism-the-problem-that-needs-to-be-solved Entry 2: https://www.streitcouncil.org/post/why-federalism-creating-the-cataracts Entry 3: https://www.streitcouncil.org/post/why-federalism-the-unit-question Entry 4: https://www.streitcouncil.org/post/why-federalism-on-citizenship
[7] Chanchal Kumar Sharma, “Does fiscal federalism prevent or provoke secessionist conflicts? The Autonomy-Equalization Conundrum and the promise of concessionary federalism,” Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1080/00323187.2025.2450370
[9] Carlo Invernizzi Acceti and Christopher J. Bickerton, Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics, Oxford University Press, 2021.
[12] Gabriella Montinola, Yingyi Qian and Barry R. Weingast, “Federalism, Chinese Style: The Political Basis for Economic Success in China,” World Politics 48.1 (1995): 50-81.
[13] Michael Pettis, “How China Trapped Itself,” Foreign Affairs, 2022, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/how-china-trapped-itself#; Adam Tooze, “Can Beijing Halt China’s Housing Avalanche?” Chartbook, 2023, https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-194-can-beijing-halt-chinas; Jeremy Mark, “There’s Less to China’s Housing Bailout Than Meets the Eye,” Atlantic Council, 2024, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/theres-less-to-chinas-housing-bailout-than-meets-the-eye/
[15] See e.g., Robert Lighthizer, No Trade is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers, HarperCollins, 2023.
[17] Details on the latest negotiations remain fuzzy and subject to change, but so far it seems the two states are focused on finding a truce. See e.g., Lisa O’Carroll and Dominic Rushe, “Trump says China will face 55% tariffs as he endorses trade deal,” The Guardian, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jun/11/trump-says-china-will-face-55-percent-tariffs-us-trade-deal-rare-earth-minerals