Are the West’s Trade Deficits China’s Fault? Warwick Powell and Radhika Desai blow some holes into the increasingly strident claims of the US and Europe that China is responsible for their trade deficits. This rhetoric is motivated by a desire to divert attention from the real culprit responsible for these deficits, the West’s own neoliberal policy paradigm, by scapegoating China and immigrants. It is also designed to divert attention from the fact that the US and European economies need radical restructuring of a sort that their current ruling classes have no appetite for, and in which they will have to rely on Chinese technology and exports. Not only did long standing deficits with China become a concern only when Chinese enterprises took over from foreign enterprises in exporting to the west, this rhetoric is also responsible for derailing th ...