Twisting facts will not help straighten China-US trade

When Andy Puzder said in an opinion piece for Fox News on Saturday that it was China that had launched a trade war against the United States 18 years ago, he repeated the platitudes often made about China's trade surplus with the US.

Simply put, he claimed that the US has been ripped off by China in their bilateral trade over the past nearly two decades. He said that China blocked US goods from entering its market, China forced US companies to transfer technology and stole commercial secrets.

How can bilateral trade between the world's largest and second largest economies last for nearly two decades with the former having been a loser and the latter the beneficiary all the time? If that were the case, their trade relations would not have lasted.