U.S. President Donald Trump is smacking tariffs on China in part to stop it from dominating the industries of the future. Economists say the strategy is doomed to fail.

Trump’s tariff list does target exports of Chinese goods that are the building blocks to becoming an advanced industrial power — machinery and electronics, metals, chemicals and transportation equipment.

But the question is whether making imports of those things to the United States a bit more expensive will curtail the sectors in China enough to thwart the nation’s advance toward mastering things like robots, biotechnology and quantum computers.

“The United States believes that they can affect China’s ability to move up the value chain by restricting exports, but they are wrong,” said Andrew Polk, co-founder of research firm Trivium China in Beijing. “There’s still a whole world that China can sell these goods to.”

The United States and China moved to the brink of a trade war Friday after the Trump administration announced tariffs on US$34 billion in Chinese imports to take effect in three weeks with another US$16 billion still to be reviewed. It also pledged additional investment restrictions.

China immediately vowed to hit back with tariffs of the “same scale and intensity” on imports from the United States and said all of China’s earlier trade commitments are now off the table, according to government statements.

The United States now sees China as a strategic rival and imposing such curbs marks a concrete shift in its strategy toward containing China’s ascent in advanced industries. The “Made in China 2025” plan, unveiled in 2015, aims to make China a global leader in 10 strategic industries that also includes high-end machinery, aerospace and advanced rail equipment.

By targeting China’s plan for future industries, Trump also can’t make much progress in another of his key goals: narrowing his nation’s huge trade deficit with the world’s second-biggest economy. That’s because China doesn’t export many of those goods to the United States now.

Louis Kuijs, chief Asia economist at Oxford Economics in Hong Kong and a former International Monetary Fund researcher, said that China actually does export mid to high-tech oriented products with domestic brands and technology, but not really to the United States.

“The strategy of the U.S. Government is to try to strong-arm China into giving up pursuit of industrial policy by using tariffs. There is no way that China is going to give up on that. It is too much an inherent part of its development strategy. To some extent, China could import high tech products and components from Europe, Japan and South Korea.”

Eswar Prasad, Cornell University economist, said that tariffs are a blunt and probably ineffective tool for the United States. He said the composition of China’s imports of goods and services from the United States leaves the Trump administration with little direct leverage in thwarting China’s technological ambitions.

“Moreover, imposing tariffs on specific products that China needs could simply accelerate China’s push to become more self-reliant in terms of innovation and sourcing of intermediate inputs,” Prasad said. (SD-Agencies)