Two hundred and fifty years ago, a ragtag band of farmers, merchants, and thinkers reached a breaking point. The Crown had rigged the rules of trade against them: extracting their resources, flooding their markets with favored goods, blocking their ability to compete on fair terms, and using economic dependency as a tool of political control.
They didn’t petition for fairness.
They didn’t write a strongly worded letter.
They declared independence.
The United States faces a remarkably familiar challenge today — not from a King but from a communist government across the Pacific that has built its rise on the systematic rigging of global trade at the expense of Americans. As we celebrate the courage and fortitude of our Founders, it is worth asking ourselves whether we are living up to that same renegade spirit.
The case for free trade relies on the assumption that all participants are playing by the market’s rules. That means private firms chasing profits, prices that reflect true production costs, and competition that rewards the most efficient producers.
China’s industrial strategy is built on the systematic rejection of every one of those assumptions. Instead of letting markets decide, the state drives outcomes through massive subsidies that create excess capacity, regardless of profitability. The CCP artificially suppresses resource costs (land, energy, capital, labor) and mandates joint ventures that force technology transfer from foreign firms. By deliberately flooding global markets with goods sold at prices no unsubsidized private competitor can match, the CCP tramples on market rules using state power
The old bureaucratic debate in Washington, D.C., has long centered on whether to protect American industries from foreign competition. But the CCP isn’t competing; it’s attempting to eliminate the American industry sector by sector. Made in China 2025, China’s self-proclaimed industrial strategy, targets advanced industries that the United States pioneered and historically dominated. For example, China’s solar panel subsidies caused global prices to collapse by 80% as state-backed producers flooded global markets with below-cost products, building domestic capacity while suppressing investment elsewhere. Naturally, the Chinese domination driven by those subsidies had a negative impact on innovation in the rest of the world.
The point of this strategy? Make the United States structurally dependent on an adversary for the inputs that a modern economy and military cannot function without. The electric vehicle (EV) sector makes the point obvious. Chinese automakers are winning because the Chinese government has poured an estimated $230 billion in subsidies into the EV sector over the past decade, allowing domestic producers to sell vehicles at prices that bear no relationship to their actual cost of production. China-owned BYD surpassed Tesla in global vehicle deliveries in 2023, powered by land grants, discounted state financing, and government procurement contracts that effectively socialized the risk of building a dominant global manufacturer. The European Union reached the correct conclusion in 2024, finding that imposing tariffs of up to 38% on Chinese EV imports following a formal anti-subsidy investigation was the only path.
The founders understood that economic and political independence were two sides of the same coin. Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, submitted to Congress in 1791, argued that a free nation could not remain free if it depended on foreign powers for the goods its economy and defense required. Sadly, today we are once again dependent.
China’s state-dominated economic model is fundamentally incompatible with free and fair trade. No amount of enforcement actions within the existing framework will resolve an incompatibility that runs to its core. The pivotal long-term step requires Congress to revoke China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations status and replace the current patchwork of reactive enforcement with permanent, predictable tariffs on Chinese goods that increase steadily over time, creating a durable signal for investment to move elsewhere.
For decades, the prevailing consensus view held that manufacturing’s decline was a natural and even welcome consequence of America’s comparative advantage shifting toward services and finance. President Trump has helped discredit that archaic view using evidence: decades of globalization and financialization have slowed investment, innovation, and growth, while industrial output and productivity have stagnated relative to their potential. Meanwhile, the communities that shouldered the brunt of that decline saw little to no benefit as the foundations of their communities eroded.
We need to confront China’s dumping strategy with more than defensive enforcement measures and to treat American industrial capacity as a strategic asset to be deliberately rebuilt. We need investment rules that keep CCP capital out of American supply chains, export controls that stop American technology from feeding Chinese military-industrial development, and a trade posture built around the principle that the United States does not grant open market access to a communist government whose explicit strategy is to weaponize that access to destroy American industry.
A free market cannot win a fight it refuses to enter. China made its choice long ago. In honor of Independence Day, Washington must decide whether it has the courage of our Founders to once again unshackle itself from a tyrannical state.
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Tricia McLaughlin served as the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. Follow her on X: @TriciaOhio