Some believe in the "Thucydides Trap": the idea that, since a rising power will challenge the dominance of an established one, a China-U.S. trade war will be inevitable. Being the largest and the second largest trading nations globally, the U.S. and China are in fact each other's most important...

Significant differences exist between official Chinese and U.S. trade statistics on the magnitudes of the China-U.S. trade balance in goods as well as in goods and services. These differences arise from a number of factors. First, the convention that exports of goods are measured on an FOB (free...

There are huge discrepancies between the official Chinese and U.S. estimates of the bilateral trade balance. The discrepancies are caused by different treatments accorded to re-exports through Hong Kong, re-export markups, and trade in services. Deficit-shifting between China, on the one hand,...