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Beyond Tariffs: What China Does to Hurt American Businesses
I was listening to Dennis O’Leary, known from the television show “Shark Tank”, testify before Congress recently. He gave the perfect example of how China works to hurt American businesses beyond putting tariffs on our products.
He described how American businesses are created by small business entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs spend time and money on research and development. They may even get patents. They fabricate prototypes and spend money on marketing.
Then they figure out they can manufacture the product cheaper in China. WeatherTech is an example. The Chinese factory produces WeatherTech products all day. They close down the factory at the end of the day and restart the factory in the evening making the knock-off version and sell it at 30% less than the American company.
Most small businesses can’t compete with that discount pricing. So, they go out of business. China is left selling yet another product to the world.
China also tries to get around tariffs by having products shipped to other countries like Mexico and Vietnam and then shipped to the United States. They “wash” their products to avoid tariffs. Chinese companies are asking Vietnamese companies to change the label on products that are made in China.
China is even trying to shift manufacturing to countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and India. According to the New York Post, South Korea Customs Service said it caught $20.8 million worth of country-of-origin violations in the first quarter of 2025. Ninety-seven percent of the shipments were U.S. bound.
Then there is the theft of intellectual property from businesses, research institutions and educational institutions. Much of the theft is by cyber “break-ins”, though the traditional human spies are still used too.
According to National Defense Magazine, China passed a law in 2014 requiring every Chinese citizen to cooperate with Chinese intelligence services. In 2019 there were 350,000 Chinese students in U.S. universities.
Besides cyber break-ins and traditional spying, China uses legal means of acquiring technology such as joint ventures, buying companies outright, partnerships with government research institutions, and hiring foreign experts and bringing them to China to work. They also set up front companies hiding China’s participation.
We all learned recently of Chinese nationals bringing in biological pathogens into our country. This is called “agro-terrorism designed to damage if not destroy our agriculture.
China also steals personal information about U.S. citizens. There is of course the fentanyl China sends via Mexican cartels killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. China even seeks to influence the young by a proliferation of TikTok videos meant to dumb down the population. In China a video directed at their young people will have a math problem and videos showing China in a favorable light. The U.S. directed videos will have sophomoric stunts and anti-American propaganda.
I have been reading a book about selling on Amazon. In it, the author is teaching the reader how to be an Amazon seller. He is not teaching how to sell your product or something meaningful to you on Amazon. He talks about finding any product and trying to be the biggest seller. He teaches about going to China to trade shows to buy products to sell on Amazon. So the rest of the world is being encouraged to sell Chinese products on Amazon. They are cheaper and popular.
I wish people would create something of their own; something meaningful to them; something that ignites there passion. Then they could sell that. But too much of the time, those people manufacture in China and as I mentioned in the beginning, go out of business when China cheats.
Every tactic that China employs hurts the U.S. economy.
Kelly Murphy Redd, CEcD, Murphy Redd Marketing