Maybe Japan Was Just a Warm-Up

[Flesh Thorn]

IN the 1980s, the United States faced an unnerving challenge from a rising economic powerhouse and export dynamo. It was an impressive challenger, to be sure, but one that often bent rules of global competition unfairly to its advantage by handing out financial subsidies to domestic companies, discriminating against foreign suppliers in government contracts, pilfering Western technology and keeping its currency cheap.

Three decades later, Americans are hearing an echo of the past. Yet this time, the object of admiration and angst is not Japan Inc., but China Inc.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” says Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., president of the Economic Strategy Institute and a former United States trade negotiator with Japan in the 1980s. “Like Japan, China is climbing up the ladder of economic and technological development, and using every means at its disposal to do so.”


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