At a recent forum, China's Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao warned that a "zero-sum" mentality in economic relations between the United States and China hurts both countries. He's right: Rising protectionism, of the kind favored by President-elect Donald Trump, is a danger to the still-sputtering global economy. What China doesn't yet accept is that much of the ire against free trade spreading around the world is a consequence of its own policies. If it wants to curtail the rise of protectionism, it should start at home.
China has arguably been the biggest beneficiary of globalization. Thanks to open markets in the West that welcomed Chinese exports, and an ample inflow of foreign investment, it was able to largely wipe out poverty, become a premier manufacturing power and create a vast new middle class.
Yet a big reason why so many people in the U.S. and elsewhere have come to see globalization as detrimental is because it forces workers in high-cost countries to compete head-to-head with low-wage Chinese. Open markets have come to seem "rigged" against the West's hardworking households.