Club Lunch: The China-U.S. Trade War and Future Economic Relations

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Those who believe in the “Thucydides Trap” — where a rising power challenges the dominance of an established power — say the U.S. and China trade war is inevitable. Instead, Professor Lawrence Lau argued that being the largest and the second largest global trading nations means the U.S. and China are each other’s most important partners in several areas. Professor Lau shared economic statistics of the past few decades and show that while the real effects of the China-U.S. trade war are not negligible, they are relatively manageable for both nations and that there is no need to panic. But he also warned that underlying the trade war is potential economic and technological competition between both nations which is likely to become the “new normal.”

Professor Lawrence J. Lau received his B.S. degree (with Great Distinction) in Physics from Stanford University in 1964 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966 and 1969 respectively. He joined the faculty of the Department of Economics at Stanford University in 1966. He became Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, Emeritus, upon his retirement from Stanford University in 2006. From 2004 to 2010, Professor Lau served as Vice-Chancellor (President) of The Chinese University of Hong Kong.