U.S. state and local governments have provided about $1.7 billion in subsidies to Chinese companies since 2010, a trend that must be reversed, said Robert Atkinson, president of Washington-based think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
“The official U.S. policy is to try to slow down China because they’re playing unfairly, if you will. So here we are trying to slow down China but at the same time, state and local governments are providing subsidies to speed up China,” Atkinson said in a recent interview with NTD.
China is known for engaging in a number of unfair trade practices, such as dumping cheap products in foreign markets, providing excessive government subsidies to Chinese companies helping them to gain market share, and stealing intellectual property (IP) and technologies. The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property estimated in 2017 that the U.S. economy suffers an annual loss of between $225 to $600 billion from China’s IP theft each year.
The subsidy amount is tabulated by Washington-based watchdog Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that promotes corporate and government accountability. It found that China-based companies received over $1.8 billion in subsidies from U.S. government bodies from 1991 to 2020. The majority of the aid, about $1.7 billion, started flowing out of the United States in 2010.
Hellbound and Down 