In 2000, Congress made the fateful decision to extend “permanent normal trade relations,” or PNTR, to China.

This article does an excellent job of presenting the route were by we came to this point in the trade arena with China. As mentioned in another thread I was in China in 2000 when they gained this "coveted" status--you might have thought they just won the world cup.

There is more than enough blame to spread around on both political parties to assure they each smell equally bad. Not mentioned in the article directly is an almost never spoken about motive shared by our "leaders"---while China was stocking the shelves of every Walmart et. al. with cheap junk---it managed to help control inflation which kept the masses calm----all while the other end of the economic spectrum shipped their jobs off to China. Yes---I will say it---the rich got richer and the poor lost ground without even being aware of it.

Now---just for the record in the event that anyone believes we (Trump) should not try to level this playing field you are wrong. I will remind those of you that have been here for a long time---in 2003 I got fired from a very lucrative high level job----because I was opposed to the CEO's desire to move manufacturing to China. Within about 4 years that strategy changed but I was long gone (and happy as well).

But---that is all secondary, there is a lot of good information in this article, I hope you will take the time to read it.