NEW YORK, Sept. 18 (Xinhua) -- An article carried by The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday criticized U.S. President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney for their tough remarks on trade with China in their election campaigns.
The opinion article entitled "Importing Jobs From China," said that it is "a good moment to look at the actual evidence and see how imports from China often create American jobs."
The article was published amid reports that the Obama Administration plans to file new complaints with the World Trade Organization against Chinese autos and auto parts.
Chinese imports in apparel and toys alone supported a total of 576,000 jobs in the United States in 2010, the article said, citing a new report from the Heritage Foundation.
And a 2010 paper from the Asian Development Bank Institute found that although each iPhone 3G exported from China to the United States with a declared value of 178.96 U.S. dollars, only 6.50 dollars of that value was clearly attributable to China, where the phones underwent final assembly, it said.
The article gave further evidence to expand the point.
"Up to 55 cents of every 1 dollar spent on a product with a 'Made in China' label actually goes to Americans who design the products; manufacture components that are shipped to China for final assembly; transport the goods; market and retail them; finance their production and trade, and so on," it quoted economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco as saying in a study.
Refuting the purported huge American job losses from trade -- 2.7 million net jobs lost to Chinese imports between 2001 and 2011, the article said: "These calculations wrongly assume that a product not manufactured in China would automatically be made in America."
"Yet manufacturing has often shifted to China not from the U.S. but from countries like South Korea or Japan from which America used to import," it said.
The article admitted that the presidential election is "bringing out the worst in both candidates on trade."
But what the country really needs, it said, is "a President willing to educate Americans about the benefits of trade - even with China."
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