Spotlight: Western media dismiss Trump's China "rape" metaphor as "absurd"

Western media and experts have dismissed as "absurd" and "nonsense" U.S. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump's accusation that China is "raping" the United States in trade.

Fox News noted on Monday that Trump has long accused China of manipulating its currency to boost the country's exports. However, his remarks in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on Sunday mark a graphic escalation in his language. While he's compared the policy to sexual assault before, this is the first time he's done so as a presidential candidate.

Trump's comments are certain to stir controversy, said Fox News.

The Independent said Trump's language "reached a new level over the weekend when he accused China of 'raping' the United States through its trade policy."

The newspaper also cited the U.S. Treasury as saying that none of the U.S. large trading partners had engaged in currency manipulation in the past year.

NBC News also noted that Donald Trump has taken his rhetoric about China to a new level.

ABC News said: "As Indiana's primary nears, Donald Trump is under fire, yet again, for another round of controversial comments."

According to Newsweek, Trump has been repeatedly promising to tackle the trade deficit if he is elected president. But "critics say he lacks the experience in international affairs to become a strong leader."

In an article named "Donald Trump Is Wrong on China -- Again" on the Forbes website, Tim Worstall, a senior fellow of British think tank the Adam Smith Institute, refuted almost Trump's every accusation against China.

"Donald Trump's claim that China is raping America is simply absurd and the claim must be treated as the nonsense that it is," said Worstall. "China happens to be producing things that American consumers desire to have -- nothing like the vile and foul crime of rape."

That's why he felt puzzled when hearing Trump calling China "the greatest theft in the history of the world," because "It's just very difficult to think of people doing exactly what you desire them to do as being theft," Worstall said.

Trump has repeatedly attacked China's trade policy, claiming the country's currency devaluation would "suck the blood out" of America.

Worstall tried to deal with Trump's "misunderstanding." Currently China works very hard to keep the value of the renminbi up instead of down, he noted.

The actions of the Chinese government thus make exports from China into the U.S. more expensive than they would be, and make U.S. exports to China cheaper than they otherwise would be -- exactly the opposite of what Trump is claiming. If China stopped "manipulating" then the trade deficit would likely widen, said the expert.

Worstall also tried to clear another major "misunderstanding" of Trump -- "imports are the point and purpose of trade."

"We are not being attacked, raped or made poorer in any manner by buying more goods from China than we sell to them. Quite the contrary: We are made richer by what we import."

Although imports are recorded as a subtraction from the gross domestic product, exports as an addition to them, but this is simply a trick of national accounting, not a reflection of the underlying economic reality.

"Both Adam Smith and Frederic Bastiat tell us that the purpose of an economy is consumption. What we get to eat, wear, play with, travel in is what determines how rich we are. Not how much we produce at all, but how much we can consume. Imports are an addition to what we can consume thus they make us richer," Worstall wrote. Endi