In the early 1970s I had a senior management role in an American company where I was both the CFO and VP manufacturing for our factory in Georgia. The factory produced air-break switches for the electric utility industry and operated a foundry which required about 50,000 pounds of bronze every week. At that time there was very high cost push inflation courtesy of the OPEC oil shock. President Nixon was doing everything he could to get this inflation under control with Government price controls. After several fialed attempts, a very strong price control law was passed in Washington and Nixon announced that he had now got prices under control ... specifically claiming that the price of bronze for my foundry would be 35 cents/lb rather and 50 cents/lb. Within 24 hours, I learned that our long time suplier would not be delivering bronze to our foundry because they were out-of-stock ... sorry about that, even though we had a very strong supply contract with our supplier! It turned out they had chosen to sell into Europe where the prices were not subject to US Governmental control. In turn, I could not source the bronze in the USA, but I could buy my requirement (needed within 3 days) in Europe ... at the world price ... but then had to fly the material to the USA so it would not disrupt our production flow a few days later. So while the Government was talking about getting the price down from 50 cents/lb to 35 cents/lb I ended up paying around $1.50 a pound to keep my production up and running. Markets work ... and attempts to make them change their behavior do not.

So free trade with China in the period from 1980 to the present time has been very beneficial to the economy of the world. Clearly China has had a number of major benefits from the trade between the rich countries of the Western world and itself and there have also been substantial benefits in Europe and North America. Over a period os around 4 decades, this trade has grown and grown, as one would expect when there are substantial benefits arising from the trade. For corporate business in Europe and North America, this trade opened up important profit opportunities ...and for the economies as a whole, the cost push inflation of pre-China trade ended as this China trade became substantial. Customers were able to buy low price goods and the sellers through the supply chain were all able to profit as well. The one big problem has been that the factories that had to go out of business and the workers that lost their jobs were huge losers ... and especially in the USA, rather little has been done to provide anything to mitigate this aspect of the situation.