The current U.S. administration's tactic of erecting tariff barriers against imports from China in the hope of forcing a remedy to its trade problem is not going to work, experts said.
"It is not going to achieve what he (U.S. President Donald Trump) is hoping to achieve and it's not going to bring back to America industries which have been in decline for decades," said Yishay Yafeh, a professor at the Hebrew University in Israel.
"It will hurt American consumers and producers," he said.
The Trump administration has been using the tactic of threatening tariffs against U.S. trading partners in the hope of forcing what it wants out of them. It imposed tariffs against exports from China and other partners, and expanded the scope of the tariffs against China when it retaliated.
China has said it is open to negotiating a resolution to the trade friction with the United States through talks based on equality and mutual respect but has resisted the tactics of the Trump administration.
Arie Reich, an expert in international trade law from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said the U.S. policy on the back of populist sentiment is "short-sighted."
"There are going to be lots of workers who are going to suffer because their own exports will not do so well anymore and because U.S. trade partners aren't standing idly by, they are also responding with their own tariffs," Reich said.
Reich said that while China has responded with its own tariffs on U.S. goods, it has been "a proportionate response."
In addition, China could potentially find other markets to buy from.
While China has said repeatedly that it has no intention to replace the United States and voiced its support for multilateralism, Yuri Pines, a professor from the Asian Studies Department at the Hebrew University, said part of the problem in the United States is the perception of China as a potential threat.
Yafeh said it is a bad policy to make use of such populist sentiment.
"In the end, everyone will lose," he said.
Reich said his research on the effectiveness of the World Trade Organization (WTO) showed that China has a good track record in respecting rulings by the WTO in international trade disputes. No WTO member has been forced to make any requests to impose trade sanctions against China.
WTO members are allowed to make requests to impose trade sanctions against their trade partners if they fail to comply with the rulings by the WTO.
The United States, however, ranked first in terms of the number of times of being a target of sanction requests by other WTO members.
Yafeh said this affirms his assessment that the United States "has a long history of trade friction with its major trading partners in Asia," though it the past the target has more often been Japan instead of China.
