China Syndrome Redux: New Results on Global Job Reallocation

Trade between the U.S. and China is widely thought to have contributed significantly to the decline in U.S. manufacturing employment --- sometimes called the China Syndrome. Flipping the point of view, we examine the impact on China of the trade growth between 2000 and 2007: We divide China into prefecture-level cities and construct measures of export exposure based on a city's initial industry specialization and instrument China's export surge using the reduction in trade policy uncertainty. Rising exports do not contribute to any growth of industrial wage or labor productivity on average, but instead channel agricultural, unemployed, and non-participating workers into the industrial labor market and cause rural-urban migration. In our main specification, the loss of one U.S. manufacturing job is associated with eight new Chinese manufacturing jobs through China - U.S. trade links.