US economy at risk without China tariffs: Gordon Chang

An author who predicts that China’s government will collapse said Thursday that the U.S economy and its intellectual property are at risk without the $50 billion in tariffs on that President Donald Trump announced.

“It’s up to President Trump to protect the American economy because if he doesn’t do that, there’s going to be very little left to our economy,” Gordon Chang, author “The Coming Collapse of China,” said during an interview with FOX Business’ Liz MacDonald.

Chang said China has a “grains of sand” of approach that enables them to copy American innovation.

“They just try to gather everything they possibly can,” Chang said. “They reassemble it in Beijing, and they figure out what’s useful and what’s not.”

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said on Thursday that Trump’s tariffs on China’s imports will curtail theft of U.S. technology.

“Talk is not cheap with the Chinese; it’s actually been really expensive because while we’ve been talking with them since 2003, they’ve been robbing our technology blind,” Navarro told FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo on “Mornings with Maria” on Thursday.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told lawmakers on Wednesday that the loss of U.S. intellectual property is a serious problem.

“We are losing that to China in ways that are not reflective of the underlying economics,” he said.