President Joe Biden meets with small business owners, April 28, 2022. Credit: The White House via Flickr
As relations between the United States and China sour, there is one important constituency keen on maintaining close trade ties — small American companies across all 50 states, many of which have done business with China for decades and hope to be doing so decades from now.
Owners and managers of such businesses — none of them Fortune 500, or even 50,000 — fret that no one in authority is trying to resolve the many areas of disagreement between the two countries, from the trade war, to the origins of COVID-19, to the future of TikTok. They seek reassurance that the bilateral relationship they’ve spent decades helping to build really is the world’s most important, not the most threatened. Such reassurance does not appear imminent.
These bosses overwhelmingly oppose decoupling, or even significantly reducing trade between the world’s largest economies. Their solution to the fraying relationship is instead to increase trade with due respect to matters of nati
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