Lin Min

    THIRTY years ago, in his quest for the Republican nomination for the U.S. presidential election, former U.S. Treasury Secretary John Connally concocted an entirely different American enemy: Japan — in place of the Soviet Union and Iran. Connally blustered that unless the Japanese practiced fair trade, “they’d better be prepared to sit on the docks of Yokohama in their Toyotas watching their Sony sets, because they aren’t going to ship them here.”

    Although he failed to be nominated, he somehow proved to be visionary in creating campaign rhetoric against Japan’s trade surplus, which later became buzzwords in U.S. election campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s.

    It is an eerily familiar scene. This year’s U.S. midterm election season has also seen a stunning increase in the number of political messages against a country — this time, China. In those highly charged messages, American politicians slammed each other for helping China take away U.S. jobs. In just one week last month, 29 candidates from both parties came out with ads attacking their rivals for being sympathetic to China, according to The New York Times.

    Such campaign rhetoric, along with previous attacks on China’s currency policy by the Obama administration and Congress, seem to have convinced many Americans that they should blame China for their unemployment.

    By Saturday, 73 percent of respondents to Ask America, a Yahoo poll, agreed it was worth the risk for the U.S. Government to enter a “trade war” with China, even if it meant higher prices for consumers.

    Online polls may not be accurate, but such an alarming figure and such poignant anti-China rhetoric should sound alarms for both the Chinese and U.S. governments.

    To prevent such animosity from growing, China needs to take urgent steps to show it is determined to narrow its trade surplus, while the United States needs to sit back and reflect on recent history, in which Japan was forced to revalue its currency drastically only to herald a Lost Decade, without erasing U.S. trade deficit.

    Following the Plaza Accord in 1985, the Japanese yen appreciated against the U.S. dollar by 51 percent by 1987. The accord was signed to reduce the U.S. deficit. However, the yen revaluation largely failed to alleviate the U.S. trade deficit with Japan because the deficit came about through structural rather than monetary conditions.

    The recessionary effects of the strengthened yen created an incentive for expansionary monetary policies that led to the Japanese asset bubble of the late 1980s, and hence a serious recession — the Lost Decade. Suffering from two decades of weak growth, many Japanese believe they are still eating the bitter pill of endaka fukyo, or high yen recession.

    The Plaza Accord saga demonstrates that the Japan woes did not make the United States a deficit-free power. There are no winners in a currency or trade war. China-bashing rhetoric is no more than a campaign tactic that only serves to mislead the U.S. public.

    Although the rhetoric may die down after the elections, damage may have already been done with the brains of Americans embedded with false fears and resentment the campaign ads have cultivated.

    For China, a public relations campaign may be needed to let Americans know that it is taking steps to narrow trade deficits, and that repeating the mistakes of the Plaza Accord will not be in the interests of either China or the United States.

    (The author is editor of the Shenzhen Daily News Desk.)