Hold on to your lugnuts! It's time for a Trade War!

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that China is preparing to levy duties on certain autos imported from the US. This would be on top of the 25 percent duties that China is still allowed to levy under its WTO commitments.

China's Ministry of Commerce said in a statement late Wednesday that it will levy antidumping and antisubsidy duties on imports from the U.S. of some vehicles with engine capacities above 2.5 liters beginning on Thursday and lasting through the next two years. ...

The ministry said several U.S. companies, including General Motors Co., Chrysler Group LLC and the U.S. arm of Honda Motor Co., engage in dumping and subsidizing. The statement said the move would also affect cars made by the U.S. arms of Mercedes-Benz and BMW AG, though it said their level of dumping was smaller.

Note that China's Commerce Ministry singled out not only the traditional US automakers GM and Chrysler, but also the US arms of Honda, Mercedes and BMW.

While China could have plausibly argued that GM and Chrysler benefit from government subsidies due to the bailouts these two companies received, they instead chose to make this about all cars with engines larger than 2.5 liters made in the US (but not in Japan or Germany!).

Does anyone think the US Congress will choose to view this as any less than an attack on the livelihoods of American workers -- and in an election year no less? Of course, Congress cannot portray themselves as innocents in all of this as Congress has already singled out China's solar panel industry for US-imposed tariffs. Then again, Congress can point to China's currency...

And on and on it goes. One thing I learned in grad school about wars (the kind in which people shoot at each other) is that it is nearly impossible to identify who started it. No matter which incident one side points to, the other side can go further back in history to identify another.

If we look at this incident only with regard to China's auto industry, it is also easy to see a kind of pattern here. Back in 2009, when China launched the stimulus heard round the world, they chose to subsidize consumer purchases of vehicles with engines smaller than 1.6 liters.

Why 1.6 liters? Because the foreign automakers that were dominating China's auto market had very little to offer in the small car segment. That subsidy was intended to boost sales of Chinese-branded cars.

Of course, the foreign automakers didn't stand still. Many of them already had small cars in the pipeline, so they got them to market faster -- just in time for China to cancel the subsidy toward the end of 2010.

Why are the import duties now focused on 2.5 liters? Because this is an area in which the foreign automakers pretty much own the market. This effort to make these imports more expensive may ideally (from China's point-of-view) accomplish two things: 1) make Chinese consumers more likely to consider a less expensive Chinese-branded car, and 2) make foreign automakers consider moving more assembly of their larger models to China.

In reality China's new tariff may not accomplish either purpose. For one, the Chinese consumers who are more interested in these larger cars (as the WSJ article points out) are less price sensitive anyway. They are already interested in these large foreign brands because they perceive them to have higher quality. In addition, because the volume of these larger cars in China is still comparatively small, it is highly doubtful that much, if any, of their production would be moved to China. (Perhaps that second one is a straw man argument.)

So what does China really stand to gain? Not much, really. In the end, China will get the trade war that it has been warning us about for years, and its home-grown automakers will still face a quality gap with their foreign partners/competitors.

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