Navarro outlined four tactics China uses to dominate emerging US industries. “They steal from us,” he began. “It’s physical theft, in terms of espionage. It’s cyber theft. It’s pure theft.” “They also have this practice called forced technology transfer,” he continued. “Basically, if you’re an American company and you want to produce and sell into the Chinese market on Chinese soil, the condition of access to the market is that you’ve got to turn over your technology. That’s an extraordinary devil’s bargain that’s not a win for this country, or that company.”

“The third thing they do is they evade export controls,” Navarro said. “We had controls on them since the Tiananmen Square massacre back in the Eighties. They like to buy sensitive military equipment. We don’t let them do that. They run very complex shell games, front companies, money laundering operations to try to evade those.”

“And then last, all the money we ship them every year, in the form of our trade deficit – it’s about a third of a trillion dollars per year – that’s really coming back to haunt us now as these big Chinese sovereign wealth funds, state-backed funds, are coming and scouring Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin, and everywhere in between for basically the crown jewels of our technology,” he said.

“President Donald J Trump thinks that the best way to make this a prosperous relationship, and a peaceful one, is to make it a fair and balanced one. We can’t keep letting China exploit the United States. We can’t let China keep transferring massive amounts of our wealth, factories, and jobs through these unfair trade practices they engage in. This is what these actions ultimately are about,” Navarro concluded.