From [HERE] The story of the shocking lockdowns, in the US and around the world, of Spring of 2020 is impossible to tell without the central role of China, where lockdowns began and where the virus is believed to have originated. The World Health Organization, with the UK and the US as signatories, proclaimed that China managed the virus properly in an influential reportdated February 26, 2020. 

This series of events did not occur in a vacuum. The US and China were in the thick of a fiery trade war, with nearly two years of rounds of claims and counterclaims, fines and retaliations, as well as on and off rounds of negotiations that proved fruitless. There was plenty of carnage on both sides along the way. 

Is there a way in which the two fields of battle – the trade row and the virus response – are somehow linked? Was the selling of lockdowns as a virus response its own form of trade retaliation? Many have speculated along those lines. 

And there’s another intriguing prospect raised by this stark reality: even while the US was in the thick of a cruel lockdown that crushed small business and so much of American civic life, trade with China actually began to recover, due mostly to the persuasive gifts of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Perhaps this was not an accident.

Let’s review the series of events.

Starting in 2018, President Trump imposed tariffs on trade with China. It was an unusual approach by any postwar standard. Normally presidents past would impose tariffs on goods from any country in the name of protecting domestic industry, or perhaps target a single country on grounds of national security. 

This was different – targeting a single country on economic grounds – and it happened because Trump had a list of countries with whom the US ran a trade deficit, which he saw as proof of how “they” owed “us” money. 

So he started at the top of the list (China) and went down (Mexico, Germany, and even Canada). There is no evidence that he fully understood either what it means to have a “trade deficit” or that these policies could not force any other country to pay anything; American consumers and businesses pay the tariffs as another form of taxation to the US government. 

In any case, contrary to what Trump promised and expected, Xi Jinping retaliated and made it ever more difficult for the US to export to or import from China. Consumers and producers on both sides suffered. For a while, the consequences for China were devastating. By October 2018, imports from China to the US fell off a cliff. 

Matters became far worse with pandemic lockdowns in the US, a period during which China had opened up completely. Trump shut down travel to China on January 31, 2020, thinking that this would keep the virus out that had been in the US already six months, and continually referred to the “China virus.” A pathogen from China was something that Trump believed he needed to stop. The result was another blow to US-China trade. 

Anthony Fauci’s deputy assistant H. Clifford Lane went to China in mid-February 2020 to observe how China had supposed crushed the virus through brutal lockdowns, and, through a WHO report, urged the US to follow the same course. Trump went along at the urging of Fauci, Deborah Birx, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as vice president Mike Pence. [MORE]