Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist. Donald Trump is a multibillionaire capitalist. They don’t have much in common, but on one thing you couldn’t get a cigarette paper between them: China trade.
Sanders has denounced trade deals with China as “designed to protect the interests of the largest multi-national corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment and the foundations of American democracy.”
Trump puts it this way: “Since China joined the World Trade Organization, Americans have witnessed the closure of more than 50,000 factories and the loss of tens of millions of jobs. It was not a good deal for America then and it’s a bad deal now. It is a typical example of how politicians in Washington have failed our country.”
In the circumstances even a Martian can probably see why these otherwise very different men did so well in yesterday's primary. China's impact on the New Hampshire job base has been the single most important factor behind both their victories. This elephant in the room has not, however, so far come to the press's attention. My searches this morning have not turned up a single mention of China trade policy in mainstream American press post-mortems on the primary.
To say that the press has suppressed discussion of the China factor is probably an exaggeration. In reality, when it comes to trade policy, the press tends – almost entirely unconsciously – to get its thinking from Wall Street. And Wall Street, of course, is too busy making money off American decline to have any interest in publicizing China’s role in that trend.
New Hampshire residents are all too aware of how profoundly their lives have been impacted by dysfunctional Washington trade policies. The chickens have now come to roost for several establishment Republican presidential candidates, most notably Carly Fiorina, who as chief executive of Hewlett Packard, presided over major job cuts in both New Hampshire and neighboring Massachusetts. Meanwhile New Hampshire's once powerful shoemaking industry has largely disappeared as employers like VF have moved operations to China.
In a study a few years ago, Robert E. Scott, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, found that New Hampshire had suffered more on a percentage basis than any other state from the loss of jobs to China. His analysis can be read here. He calculated that jobs lost to China in the ten years to 2011 totaled 20,400. That's a big number for a small state and it represented 2.94 percent of the state’s total workforce.
