Is it Beneficial for the United States to Trade with China?

“Made in China” is what a familiar phrase that we can see on the backs of half of goods in the U.S. market. The goods that are made in China have been flooding the U.S. market since China joined in WTO. While most of the American people are enjoying benefits of cheap Chinese goods, some of the American manufacturers are complaining about that cheap Chinese goods have been greatly challenging them and taking up their market. Some of the economists were also blaming the significantly increased trade deficit on the increased cheap Chinese imports; however, some of the economists were arguing back that China now is now third largest U.S. trading partner. China is one of the biggest markets in the world; after the entry of WTO, U.S. exporters will enjoy more and more benefits from the larger and larger Chinese market. The U.S.-China trade issue has been controversial since it started because of the differences between the two countries in cultural and societies. There are both drawbacks and benefits for United States in trading with China, but overall it is beneficial for the United States to trade with China. 

The first drawback involves IPR (intellectual property rights). According to Morrison China didn’t provide enough protection to U.S. intellectual property rights (3). 

The Chinese market has founded only for about 25 years; the government lacks of experience in controlling and organizing the market, so there are lots of problems in the market. Piracy flooding the market is one of the biggest problems. Because the average income of Chinese people is $900 dollars per year it is too low for them to afford the expensive legal goods like Microsoft products, (one window XP costs about $200 dollars) Adidas, Nike and so on. The piracy producers take this advantage to make a lot of cheap knock off products, which most of the Chinese people would like to spend money on instead of the expensive legal products. Even though the Chinese government has been putting the effort of stopping the piracy, it is still hard to control this issue.