GE engine ban slap down gives boost to bilateral trade

Whether because of his inherent business acumen or because he doesn't want to let the hawks in his administration continue to hijack his China agenda making it more confrontational, the US president on Tuesday rejected a potential proposal to block the sale of General Electric jet engines to China.

"We want to sell product and goods to China and other countries," he tweeted. "That's what trade is all about. We don't want to make it impossible to do business with us. That will only mean that orders will go to someplace else."

His remarks came in response to media reports that the United States government was considering a proposal to halt deliveries of jet engines co-produced by General Electric Company for the COMAC C919 airliner developed by China－in yet another push by hawks to decouple the US from China following a bid to strangle Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

Advocates for the latest restrictions argue that China could reverse engineer the GE jet engine, and the country's rising aircraft industry could pose serious competition to US-based Boeing, or boost China's military capabilities.

But such arguments don't hold water. Chinese airlines already own lots of planes powered by GE engines－for example, it has more than 80 MAX jets with the particular type of GE engine that is used for the C919. If Chinese manufacturers had the intention and capability to copy GE's jet-engine technology, they could have done that a long time ago.

And the US already maintains the world's tightest restriction on exports to China of technology and goods that have both civilian and military uses.

GE has established its presence in China for more than four decades since the country launched reform and opening-up, with business having thrived on the country's rapidly growing aviation industry. It just doesn't make any business sense to force it out of this lucrative market based on a nonexistent security threat, especially given that China is expected to overtake the US as the world's largest aviation market in 2022.

As the US president's tweet indicates this is just another example of hawks in the US attempting to use political means to undermine US companies' normal business cooperation with China, simply because it is China they are doing business with.

Against this background, and especially in the wake of a trade war that lasted for over a year and came to a halt only in mid-January with a preliminary trade deal, as well as its attack on Huawei, it is certainly an encouraging move for the US leader to stress that "I want China to buy our jet engines", and that everyone in his administration has been instructed to work on making it easier for China to do business with the US.

Hopefully, they will do as bid and show the US really is "open for business".