U.S. Trade Rep. Robert Lighthizer: ‘We’re Not Starting a Trade War at All’ with China

RUSH EXCERPT:

INGRAHAM: "You are off to Asia, it’s a big trip. It’s the longest trip the president has ever taken since he was inaugurated. What’s the goal?" 
LIGHTHIZER: "This is a very important trip it has two elements. One is security. Geo politics. And the other is trade and economic issues. I’m obviously concerned about the second. We’re going to Japan, to Korea, to China, to Vietnam and the Philippines. That would be 65 billion-dollar deficit. 27 billion-dollar deficit. 350 billion-dollar deficit. 32 billion-dollar deficit and in the Philippines we don’t have a lot of trade with we have essentially balanced trade on a small volume there are a lot of economic issues. A lot of trade issues. The biggest one, of course, is China." 
INGRAHAM: "Purely on the China front, what can we do other than impose tariffs to stop the Chinese cheating on international trade whether it’s dumping, whether it’s subsidies of major corporations selling products for under market value?" 
LIGHTHIZER: "I mean, we have to have a coordinated effort within the administration. I think we do. First of all, the geo politics is somebody else’s problems. I’m going to focus very much on working men and women and farmers. That’s what I was hired to do. That’s what I’m going to worry about. China has an industrial policy that involves a lot of subsidies, a lot of dumping, a lot of forced technology transfer. All these sorts of things. What have we done? We have you dumping. Case on 301 looks at the intellectual property transfer." 
INGRAHAM: "They call Cold War era relic. The quote free traders criticize you and the administration for using this outdated federal statute to go after China." 
LIGHTHIZER: "It’s a very effective tool. We’ll use the WTO when we can. The president is willing to act unilaterally when he has to. We say it’s Cold War era. Ronald Reagan used it and used it very effectively and made a big difference for our trade policy. A lot of people benefited from it we will use every tool we can, as long as it’s fair and consistent with law." 
INGRAHAM: "China has something called their 2025 project. It’s their focus to dominate every major industry from 3-d printing to rare Earth. To heavy manufacturing, tool manufacturing. It’s really ambitious. Is it just kind of pie in the sky thinking or is there a real opportunity for China to dominate all those industries?" 
LIGHTHIZER: "It’s a very, very serious challenge. Not just to U.S., but to Europe, Japan, and the global trading system. And basically it’s very focused. The areas you talked about but also aerospace on new energy vehicles. I mean, they want to be on top of all the high tech, all the cutting edge economic areas. And it’s smart for them to do it. They are doing something that’s in their interest and that they should do. We should be in a position defend ourselves with the same amount of vigor. I think this president will do that that is a general genuine threat". Massive subsidies, closed markets and focus on technology transfer. It’s a very, very serious threat in all of those areas and if you go through the parts of our economy that are affected by it, it’s hard to find any kind of a tech part that’s not potentially adversely affected by this."