WASHINGTON – A new survey by The Brookings Institution has found that 54 percent of Americans believe the U.S.-China trade war is mostly about their overconsumption of popular Chinese takeout staple Kung Pao Chicken, while 22 percent attributed the problem to multiple purchases of iPhones and 17 percent said it was due to overuse of Asian porn.
Just 4 percent of the respondents to the the Washington-based think tank’s survey correctly stated that the trade war was largely based on U.S. claims of China’s rampant theft of intellectual property rights, while the remaining 3 percent said they were either too stoned on Bubba Kush to care and did not know whether China’s marijuana laws applied to the United States or had only a hazy perception of what was being asked.
The Brookings Institution said the telephone survey of approximately 1,200 Americans between the ages of 23 and 85, carried out in the first week of February, indicated a “vast disconnect” between Americans’ perceived knowledge of international affairs and their actual understanding.
“What we found was a very limited conceptualization by the respondents of such things as ‘foreign trade,’ ‘tariffs,’ any terminology with the word ‘intellectual’ in it and ‘geopolitical reckoning,’” Brookings senior analyst Whitney Hetherington said. “That the respondents by a clear majority thought Kung Pao Chicken was the main sticking point between the United States and China on trade shows not only a general confusion about where their food is coming from but also a shortfall in palate, as Kung Pao Chicken as sold in the U.S. can only be recognized as a bastardized version of the Sichuan original.”
One of the respondents in the survey, 36-year-old Mitch Everley of Dearborn, Michigan, said he assumed his Kung Pao Chicken was imported from China by his local takeout, Lim’s Bamboo Garden. “I guess I can see how the profts from my order are probably repatriated to Beijing through a complex series of transactions that start at Lim’s and wend their way across the globe, but at just $7.95 per order I think I can live with that deficit given the weekly gustatory boost it gives me,” Everley said.
As for the contention that purchases of iPhones were skewing the trade balance, Hetherington said the respondents were nearer to the mark. Although they vaguely thought Apple might be a Taiwanese company responsible for much of greater China’s trade surplus with the U.S., they were correct that iPhones count as imports into the U.S. because they are mostly assembled in China, she said.
The respondents were clearly wrong, however, in their contention that Asian porn imports were coming mostly from China, Hetherington added. “Currently, our back-office tech analysts have Japan rated as their top Asian porn source with China nowhere near the top 10, so that can’t be right,” she said. “However, Mick, T-Bomb, Shiraz and Dirty Larry said they would put in some extra research to see if some of their findings may have been anomalous due to their singular, purely academic focus on banzaipleasures.com to the exclusion of potentially more popular Chinese sites like buttpluggedinshanghai.com.”