Todd Bishop
The Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported on Wednesday that the Japanese government expressed serious concern about the growing global trade protectionism in the 2019 White Paper on Trade. The draft pointed out that the Sino-US opposition has the potential to confuse trade and industry in third countries.
Kyodo News on Saturday (8th) pointed out that in the draft of the White Paper on Trade in China in 2019, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry accused the huge financial aid from the Chinese government, causing market distortions and becoming a US tariff on Chinese exports to the United States. background”. The Japanese government plans to hand over the White Paper on Trade in China to the cabinet meeting in July.
The Nihon Keizai Shimbun quoted the White Paper on Trade in China as saying that “protectionism is intensifying and the multilateral trading system may fall into unsound function.”
Kyodo News reported that the draft said that China’s integrated circuit companies received a total of about 3.4 trillion yen (about 250 billion Hong Kong dollars) of financial aid from the Beijing government between 2015 and 2017, and revealed that major Chinese companies are below market levels. Low-interest rates get huge loans. The draft suspects that these are measures that distort the market.
The draft also pointed out that subsidies from the Chinese government increased nearly four times from 2008 to 2017, with a higher proportion of grants for specific areas such as the new generation of the information technology industry.
The draft also describes the Sino-US trade friction, the third global protectionism since the 20th century, the first is after the global economic depression in the 1930s, and the second is the Japan-US trade friction in the 1980s. The draft said that the previous two trade frictions respectively established the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) to quell protectionism, but this trade war has not yet seen a similar trend.
