In my movie, "Death By China," it shows Bill Clinton in 2000 promising that when China got into the World Trade Organization we would be making products here and selling them there, and life would be great. Just the opposite has happened. And here's why this has been so devastating - China went into the World Trade Organization and agreed to play by certain rules. Instead, it's violated these rules. For 15 years, it continues to illegally subsidize its exports.
Peter NavarroFrom 1947 to 2001, the American economy grew annually at a rate of 3.5 percent. After China got into the World Trade Organization, got access to our markets and flooded our markets with its illegally subsidized exports, we grew at a rate of 1.8 percent from 2002 to 2015. That's almost cut in half.
Peter NavarroThis is what Donald Trump understands. This is the trade deficit. We run a trade deficit of close to $800 billion a year.
Peter NavarroWhen China got into the WTO, that allowed it to sell into any other country within the WTO - not just the United States - at the lowest tariffs that country offered. And the other countries could sell into China at the lowest tariffs that China offered. The problem, right off the bat, was that China had much higher tariffs than everywhere else, so the U.S. and Europe in particular got the short end of that stick.
Peter NavarroWe're going right down the toilet, and it's a made-in-China toilet. I teach MBAs. And I noticed, starting a few years after China joined the World Trade Organization, that a lot of my students were no longer employed. They were still coming to get their MBA, but they'd lost their jobs.
Peter Navarro