CHINA/TRADE: "Trump’s primary focus on the stump was China, which he depicted as a rapacious monolith that manipulates its currency and employs protectionism to destroy American industry so its own factories can fill the resulting vacuum. This is a direct channeling of his trade advisor Peter Navarro, a professor of economics and public policy at UC Irvine, whose recent books include 'The Coming China Wars' (2006) and 'Death by China: Confronting the Dragon' (2011).
Navarro has advanced the viewpoint that America’s trade deficit, especially with China, is a significant drag on U.S. economic growth. This notion has been questioned by economists and trade experts across the political spectrum.
'To Navarro, trade isn’t cooperation, but a winner-take-all competition … a zero-sum game, which produces national winners and national losers,' observes Dan Ikenson, a trade expert at the libertarian Cato Institute. Ikenson says that’s fundamentally wrong because it fails to acknowledge that trade can foster growth even for countries on the negative side of a trade imbalance, as the U.S. is with China."
– “Will President Trump run roughshod over business expectations in 2017?,” The Los Angeles Times, Dec 29, 2016, Michael Hiltzik, 12/29/2016