When Chinese President Xi Jinping's team was considering U.S. stopovers for his state visit to Washington this week, a surprising choice was floated: Detroit. According to the South China Morning Post, China's little-known role in reviving the city's economy had it in the running. Unspecified "security concerns" knocked it off. Instead, Xi will go to Seattle to see the global tech elite and flaunt China's influence in that sector.
Too bad it's too late for Xi to reconsider. A Detroit trip would highlight the benefits of trade with his country. Not every American will like the idea that China has become crucial to the future of what's no longer really the Motor City. But it's easy to make the case that Chinese investment plays a significant part in protecting Detroit from something worse: a return to the crumbling urban disaster of recent headlines.
Detroit's links to China were forged decades ago. As early as 1979, American Motors Co. formed a joint venture to produce Jeeps in China, believing that an opening Chinese market would be a boon to any global auto manufacturer. AMC was a few decades too early, but it had the right idea. In 2009, China supplanted the United States as the world's largest auto market, and in 2013 it supplanted the U.S. again to become General Motors' largest market. Meanwhile, as China's economy slows, automakers continue investing in China, believing projections that by 2020, China's total auto market will become bigger than the U.S. and the EU combined.