I'm John Batchel with my good colleague, Gordon Chang, at Gordon G. Chang.

And we're speaking with our colleague Alan Tonneson on manufacturing and trade right now,

as the Trump administration deals with the opakness of the Chinese intentions.

However, I point to a column recently in the Financial Times that raised the question

to me entirely about trade, whether China really believes in trade. The author of the piece,

it's a Financial Times op-ed piece, has some pithy things to say about that.

Robin Harding is his name.

He's in conversation with a Chinese interlocutor, an economist.

And he asks, what is it the product that you're going to want to sell to the rest of the world, especially Europe?

Trade is in exchange.

What are you going to sell to us?

And what are you going to buy from us?

And the answer was soybeans and iron ore. The European shrugged the shoulders and said, that's not us.

What about us? What are you going to buy from Europe? The Chinese interlocutor in all good graces observed maybe Louis Vuitton handbags.

That sort of was the end of the list.

And I believe the point here is that trade is an exchange.

You do something better than I do.

I do something better than you do.

We exchange.

Sometimes there's monetary reward. Oftentimes there's the convenience of feeding our industrial industries. In other words,

jobs for people who live here. And Robin Harding comes to this conclusion, and I ask my colleagues

to philosophize about it. He writes,

...