As China continues its rise to becoming the world’s most prosperous economy, the U.S. government’s refusal to participate in the trade war between the two nations has cost the economy dearly and will only do further harm in the future.

“I don’t blame the Chinese, they’re just pursuing their national interest,” Patrick Mulloy said, a member of the Congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. “I blame us for not realizing what’s happening to us and for doing nothing about it.”

The government’s failure to craft any form of trade policy to counter China’s predatory trade practices has cost the nation more than 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since allowing China to join the WTO. Last year alone, America’s trade deficit with China hit a record $273 billion.

“We’re in the middle of an economic war with China,” said Milton Magnus, president of Leeds, Alabama-based M&B Hangers, America’s last maker of metal coat hangers, who also destroys his old machines, which are designed and built in-house. “The Chinese want what we have and we’re just sitting back and giving it to them.”

American businesses are the chief casualty. Nearly 40 percent of factories with more than 250 workers closed down last decade. Chinese practices such as cheap labor, currency manipulation, technology theft and illegal subsidies are all part of the playbook that China has used for rapid economic growth.

Instead of taking action, the U.S. government and ‘American’ companies have been complicit. The USTR has failed to represent small businesses at the WTO, forcing them to spend millions of dollars on investigations that are never enforced. Large corporations outsource jobs to China, and then share all of their methods and secrets with the Chinese government, effectively signing their own death warrant.

“It doesn’t really matter how small your manufacturing operation is, the sector is systematically being hollowed out,” Charles Blum of the Coalition for a Prosperous America said. “We figured the global market would take care of itself and that as a result the United States would turn out to be the winner. But it hasn’t quite worked out that way.”

America desperately needs some form of actual trade policy, instead of continuing to let foreign interests rob us blind. International trade is about mutual gain for both sides, not one party mugging the other. America’s clearly failed method to approaching trade thus far needs to be scrapped in favor of an actual trade policy to reduce our trade deficit and create jobs.

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