This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 15th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There are legitimate reasons to take issue with China's trade practices, but the White

House in its response leapt immediately to tariffs.

Simon Lester, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute, is author of the new paper

Disciplining China's Trade practices at the WTO, how WTO complaints can help make

China more market oriented.

We spoke this week.

The President and a lot of his accolades in the Trump administration have tried to make great hay out of the fact that China engages in intellectual property theft, that their rules for engaging with China on trade deals

are very stringent and often require the transfer of technology to Chinese entities.

And while you and I can have a reasonable debate about, you know, why this is problematic and it certainly is.

But the response from the administration

is tariffs, tariffs, tariffs.

And so far, the US and China if essentially tried to say who's going to blink first in a trade war. That's right. There's a wide range of concerns about China's trade practices and it's sort of the basics like high-tech of

concerns about China's trade practices. It's sort of the basics like high tariffs, subsidies, the use of state-owned enterprises to discriminate

against foreign companies.

It's the intellectual property theft that you talked about. And I think

you know everyone generally agrees that these are problems and the question is well what's the

solution? What do we do? And the Trump administration has pushed forward with you know one answer only and that's tariffs.

And going into this, when they started, there was a lot of criticism from people like me and

now they're saying this isn't going to work. China doesn't want to be bullied like that. China has a lot of pride.

They're not just going to back down under these threats.

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