Posted on 10/28/2019 4:29:56 PM PDT by cba123
President Donald Trump’s guiding principle in United States-China relations is expressed by one of his favorite words: "reciprocal." He also loves the noun form, “reciprocity,” and says there’s been “far too little” of it until he got to the White House.
The president has most prominently and effectively applied his operating philosophy in the area of trade. Sometimes, as he said, reciprocity means “they do it, so we do it”; other times it is necessarily asymmetrical, rather than pure tit-for-tat. We don’t respond to intellectual property theft, for example, by stealing China’s trade secrets and technological know-how. Instead, tariffs serve nicely to punish China’s malign behavior and potentially deter future offenses.
The Trump economic retaliation also includes banning important Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE from continuing their subversive technological advances into America’s commerce and national security.
This week, the Trump administration extended its reciprocity doctrine to the realm of diplomacy. The State Department announced that, henceforth, the United States would not be as generous and open-handed as it has been in allowing the free movement of Chinese officials in this country. Now, Chinese diplomats must notify the State Department before they engage in contacts with representatives of state, local and municipal governments as well as visits to public and private educational and research institutions, including national laboratories in the U.S. and its territories.
State Department officials say the change is made to reciprocate for similar rules that U.S. diplomats face in China. But Washington’s new rules are still less onerous than China’s, which require not only notification but prior approval. (This is analogous to the exchange between Trump and Xi Jinping after the U.S. president held a telephone conversation with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen. Xi wanted veto power ...
(article continues, see link for full article)
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
About darned time.
Washington bureaucrats only know how to be “fair” to themselves.
Like the article says, it’s a good start but does not go far enough. But it is a good start, especially with the lopsided access the Chinese enjoyed.
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