They're about 10 years too late and completely tone deaf. I don't see much be progress coming from a reminder to foreign companies that their access to the Chinese domestic market is subject to the arbitrary decisions of the CCP's top brass.
"Promoting a China-free supply chain will inevitably result in a decline in China's demand for U.S. products and American companies loss of market share and revenue in China,"
Something that China had been pushing for years now…
Yes, this is a good point - the Chinese government has been encouraging full technological and also broader market independence at home for years now. Seems a strange talking point.
> Something that China had been pushing for years now…
Given the source and the target of said message, it reads like a mob-like "you have a nice business here, it would be a shame if something happened to it".
Am I the only one deeply amused that the title of this article is prefixed by “Exclusive” while its content basically boils down to: “The representatives of the Chinese government in the USA are doing their job: representing the interests of China”?
Nice example of how a foreign nation would exercise influence through business people. CCP saw the similar danger in Jack Ma and others, because of their natural tendency to align closer to US value (because they are capitalists), and their companies' listing on US stock exchange.
It's only now that CCP start to play the same game.
The rivalry between US and China is going to be interesting. I hope in the process other developing countries would gain much from these 2 big boys looking to influence people across the globe.
I don't understand why America, long a champion of immigration, doesn't open the floodgates back up.
We could onshore factories and staff them from all over the world. Pay workers wages comparable to what they would get from working in factories at home (ie. not "US wages" since we can't compete on cost with China, Vietnam, etc.), but give them decent hours, a housing stipend, education for their kids, and a promise of US citizenship. Also offer them courses on American culture, English, etc. "Melting pot" rather than unsupported labor. We could make it really comfortable and attractive.
To incentivize business, we could offer zero taxes over the next fifty years to run factories domestically. Start with the critical pieces, and then build everything.
Growing beyond 300M would also dramatically increase our consumer base.
To keep natural born citizens from getting angry, we can offer tax incentives for people having children. We can pay kids $20/week to study and get good grades (not a bad idea - it especially incentivizes poorer kids!). We can also grant credits for kids that excel in math/science, music/art, sports/club, etc. Keep them engaged and growing.
> I don't understand why America, long a champion of immigration, doesn't open the floodgates back up.
America has never been a champion of immigration, and honestly I don't really remember a time that the 'floodgates were open' so to speak, and it's not even a partisan issue. The last major immigration tightening was Bill Clinton with IIRAIRA in 1996 while the last amnesty was Reagan in 1986.
Don't take my word for it, here's what Benjamin Franklin, founding father, had to say.
"Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation, and as Ignorance is often attended with Credulity when Knavery would mislead it, and with Suspicion when Honesty would set it right; and as few of the English understand the German Language, and so cannot address them either from the Press or Pulpit, ’tis almost impossible to remove any prejudices they once entertain." - Benjamin Franklin, 1753.
Tell me that's not a highfalutin 1700s take on "they're not sending their best, folks."
> We could onshore factories and staff them from all over the world.
That doesn't need people, it needs robots. The factories of the future have zero people inside.
Immigrants have a way of wanting to close the door as soon as they get through it. For sure after the first wave, even if nobody else had been allowed in, you could still wind up with the same percentage of folks with immigrant ancestors.
> I don't understand why America, long a champion of immigration, doesn't open the floodgates back up.
The US is not, and has never been, a champion of immigration. Immigration has been seen as "people taking our jobs" pretty much since the founding of the country. Immigration has always been tolerated as a "necessary evil" by policymakers.
> We could onshore factories and staff them from all over the world. Pay workers wages comparable to what they would get from working in factories at home (ie. not "US wages" since we can't compete on cost with China, Vietnam, etc.), but give them decent hours, a housing stipend, education for their kids, and a promise of US citizenship. Also offer them courses on American culture, English, etc. "Melting pot" rather than unsupported labor. We could make it really comfortable and attractive.
Where does all the money for that come from, though? Existing citizens will not tolerate the tax hikes. And if the companies are paying "home country" wages, the people who come here won't have any purchasing power. You're basically importing poverty if you do that, and are creating a weird hybrid of a "company town" system, which we know leads to abuse and exploitation.
> To keep natural born citizens from getting angry, we can offer tax incentives for people having children. We can pay kids $20/week to study and get good grades (not a bad idea - it especially incentivizes poorer kids!).
I don't think these suggestions are politically feasible. Many of the people who hate immigration would also see a bunch of that stuff as "welfare" and "handouts" and wouldn't want it.
> The US is not, and has never been, a champion of immigration. Immigration has been seen as "people taking our jobs" pretty much since the founding of the country. Immigration has always been tolerated as a "necessary evil" by policymakers.
That isn’t true at all, if only because the US isn’t some homogenous being with one opinion. Immigration as a “necessary evil” is still pro immigration, vs a place like China where getting even a green card if you aren’t Han requires an act of god.
You’re solution sounds similar to what places like Dubai are known for. i.e. Paying foreign impoverished wages in a wealthy country in exchange for work, housing, etc.
Companies generally have a poor track record of investing in their employees.
This sort of radical idea just can't get off the ground in the US two-party system. It would be too risky to invest in something so controversial that it could be reversed in less than four years.
Because the US didn't have a giant welfare system when the 'floodgates' were open.
Immigrants moved to New York or other places, and worked exceptionally hard to provide for themselves or were forced to return home.
Now, they can move to San Francisco and have the city spend thousands of dollars on them for free.
It's nearly impossible to starve on US streets today, because there's free food on nearly every street.
This fact naturally attracts low intelligence economic migrants who don't have the conscientiousness or work ethic of early New York immigrants. We've seen it in Europe. The vast majority of the migrants (who settled in the places with the best welfare systems, not the closest safe country) do not work and do not contribute to society. There's also evidence they push crime up, as well as having values that are fundamentally illiberal (for example, wanting to criminalize homosexuality and supporting terrorist groups).
Migrants everywhere are, as a group, net contributors to welfare programs. You're living in propaganda land if you actually believe the myth of immigrants coming to get welfare: immigrants come to work.
In 2012, 51 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) reported that they used at least one welfare program during the year, compared to 30 percent of native households. Welfare in this study includes Medicaid and cash, food, and housing programs.
The average household headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) costs taxpayers $6,234 in federal welfare benefits, which is 41 percent higher than the $4,431 received by the average native household.
This is a myth based on skewed data, by the way. This "net contributor" figure was reached by combining the wealthy Luxembourgian bankers who sometimes immigrate to countries with the thousands of people they offset.
If there were no welfare, the Luxembourgian banker would still be able to immigrate. As would lower and middle class people who work. The only people you're defending at that point is the people who refuse to work (a significant portion of the migrants during the EU migrant crisis still do not work).
A "safety net" is not supposed to be used so you never have to work. It's supposed to be a temporary cushion if you are in a bad spot. Not 2, 3, 4, 5 years (which you spend not integrating into your host country at all). Integration is a major problem, and migrants have created enclaves in Sweden, Germany and the UK with rules that do not match the host country.
This is a hilarious comment. Granted this forum has an over-abundance of the so-called academic elite and so phrases like "low intelligence" and "work ethic" can be passed around with impunity.
But what I cant look past is the audacity to suggest and eveb imply that historical migrants from Europe(mostly) worked hard and had some magically higher IQ. What? If even the academic elite, who pride themselves in their rational objectivity, can whitewash history to that extent - it is worrisome. Truly frightening.
Just chalk it up to being the worlds pop cultural, economic center - and deal with it. People have always migrated to the country/state where the opportunity to prosper is greatest. It's osmosis and you can't really stop it until and unless the US becomes a third world country devoid of wealth, freedom and opportunity.
Europeans do have a higher average IQ than places like Sudan which has an average IQ in the 70 range.
To put this in perspective, the US Army generally doesn't accept people below 85 IQ because they are ineffective in any position (yes, they are considered inadequate to be a janitor).
You also didn't address my point about values or crime, both of which are proven. Particularly, some immigrant groups have huge portions of support for groups like ISIS. [1] That's before we get into the homophobia and abuse of women.
See, heres the thing: some countries really have no implicit interest in [copying] or attempting to define themselves by European standards. Does that make sense?
So things like western education (countries like S.Korea, Japan, India and China being the exceptional European standard [chasers?]) Will always score not western countries lower because the west is the defacto standard due to colonization and globalization.
To put it in simpler terms, we can't judge a fish by its ability to climb trees as the adage goes.
Which is interesting because sone countries overall growth and development strategy is based on copying verbatim the trajectory of 20th century Europe/US and offering no alternative. This is a false suggestion that European standards are the end all, the pinnacle of human progress.
until china starts moving for better rights for their citizens, i am afraid they should be held at arms length. cannot trust a government that lies that over 1 million people are just being "re-educationed" and "happy" and "want to be there", there is a reason for distrust and it's not "xenophobic" to point out the regimes bs, the people of china deserve a better government. don't even get me started on hong kong. the whole situation is not fun
It's really not the business of the US government to be sanctioning China over "better rights for their citizens", when the US has already got massive prison labour camps, racist policing system, and has mishandled the Cvid-19 pandemic to the point where there's a million dead and more injured long-term from long Covid.
China is not a perfect system, and the response to terrrorism in Xinjiang should probably not be extensive prison camps and a surveillance state - but again, the US doesn't have a leg to stand on for criticising this when their response to terrorism is to lay waste to several different countries and cause millions of deaths.
It's all very well for us to sit here and wish for a better system in China, but we all have a much better chance of fighting for and winning a better system here in the USA that would actually change lives here.
I don't understand your mindset, possibly you could expand a bit for me. Shouldn't the US try to improve China? Worst case scenario the US is hypocritical, but that doesn't mean it still shouldn't wield its power for good. Doesn't your position "make the perfect the enemy of the good"? I'm interested in hearing your response.
But why China specifically? Why not wield this power to improve Saudi Arabia for example? (note that since the Saudis are allied and deeply rely on the US, it should be easier to sway them into doing good)
There are a variety of reasons proponents of changing China could make in response, for example since China is becoming (already?) powerful independently from the United States which could (already?) makes them a greater threat, having our opponents share as many values as possible would be ideal in a multipolar world order. However, I'm not arguing for that position, I just don't understand the idea that because the United States has failed on X, Y, or Z issues that that means we shouldn't try to solve those problems whenever they appear. Does that make sense? I can give clarification if needed.
The goal of US foreign policy has never been to improve the lives of people anywhere outside the US. A sibling comment points out that one of our closest allies in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy that publicly beheads dissidents and has incredibly sexist laws, yet the US does nothing, and we see nothing like the neo Cold War coverage that Xinjiang produces. The US will remain an ally of Saudi Arabia because that is beneficial to the interests of the US, not the people subject to the Saudi regime.
If you think I’m a cynic or conspiracy theorist, take a look at what the US has done in other countries since WW2, in many cases overthrowing democratically elected governments in favor of US friendly regimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r.... This is what the US has always done to other countries, expecting them to care about morals or improving anyone’s lives is missing their goal completely (and taking their propaganda at face value).
Whatever the goal of confrontation with China is, improving human rights is the least likely possibility.
I don't disagree substantially, and I don't think you're a "conspiracy theorist", however I must say that you and many others seem to be reading into my question what I did not mean. I'm not asserting that the US has had positive impact, I'm asking whether or not they should have a positive impact despite internal issues still existing. Does that make sense?
Yeah I see your point. I think what I and others are saying is that given the US’s 70+ year track record at serving their own interests at the detriment of foreign people, there is no reason for them to completely change their goals with no reason. The US defense apparatus doesn’t exist to be a moral good or improve the lives of foreigners, it exists to serve the interests of wealthy Americans. The professed moral goals are propaganda and will always be false - they’ve had these justifications for every action they’ve taken from supporting death squads to installing dictators to topple democracies
US has been doing that since 1978. US capital and domestic market improved China's economy tremendously. And in the process US capitalists get astronomical amount of profit.
Should US interfere China's political system?
Sure. But since China is so powerful in its military. I see no reason that US can force that upon China.
Thank you, I really liked your response. I think you answered an important, parallel, issue which is the practicality of influencing China. This is a different, though interconnected, issue which can sometimes have completely different implications. Foreign policy is fascinating, I must say.
Unless the US improves itself first, then I don't think China is going to believe that the US is making these criticisms and imposing these sanctions with any kind of coherent moral framework. They're going to look at this as a way to restrict and punish them.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, I appreciate it.
I don't quite think the idea that the country needs a "coherent moral framework" to justify taking action to improve particular moral issues. China itself has a coherent framework, but it's wrong and promotes grave injustice (coherence does not mean correct).
Maybe to better understand each other you could comment on my criticism of making "the perfect the enemy of the good" since I think that's the defining issue that's causing me to struggle understanding your point of view.
The situation is +-same in more than half of the world, yet people in US largely don't care since its not part of ongoing medialized trade war.
Compare it to Saudi Arabia which gets free pass on basically any atrocity because oil and US military bases. Or Pakistan supporting Taliban and de facto defeating US army in battle of mental attrition in Afghanistan from the shadows. Or Israel which is committing war atrocities on Palestinian population, and running biggest concentration camp in western world (Gaza Strip). And so on.
Sure, they do bad stuff that they view will help them in future to have more homogeneous population. Which will probably end up true.
You wanna 'held them at arms length'? Well slap tariffs on Chinese-manufactured goods, you can start with Apple products.
Yeah sure but we should do them also hold Israel at arms length for holding 2 million people in a literal concentration camp in Gaza and also heavily restricting the rights of Palestinians in West Bank. Why this is not called genocide when the Uighur situation is, is beyond me.
I wonder if the onset of globalization and offshoring US factories to China on top of Citizens United will be remembered as the US's "Fall of Rome" moment. The US essentially allowed the government to be bought and paid for by foreign entities and is relying on said countries for most manufactured goods. So now the other country can essentially say "Our laws are your laws otherwise we're not going manufacture your goods." China doesn't need to occupy us, they just need to buy us out.
In my opinion the US not capitalizing on China taking the undesirable, low-skill labor is the miss. The inescapable future of humanity is full automation of low-skill (and potentially higher skill) jobs, especially manufacturing. Rather than lament China taking these on before the robots could get to them and pining for a long-departed past, America could have used this huge head start as an advantage and shaped society and the economy in support of this inevitable future.
Mark my words, those jobs are never coming back to American human workers. And that's fantastic, they sucked. Society needs to prepare for the future where there's more people than work to be done.
To know how to automate a job, you have to know how to do the job, and all the physics behind it, plus the automation skills. If there are no factories in your country that even produce that product there isn’t going to be a supply of people to automate the job. The automation jobs and tech that goes with that will follow the manual labour jobs and factories they are in.
There are still those alive, who can be consulted about the "old ways".
That said, the US still has a massive manufacturing industry, Mexico even larger, and of course there are places like India, and the entire rest of the world...
So China has zero stranglehold on "how to make things". Just current infrastructure to do so.
Note, the real issue is the economics. No China, and if no alternative cheap source of labour, mean massive, massive inflation.
Well, in part because independent trade unions are illegal in China. And by "independent" I mean not a mouthpiece of the CCP. This is partly what I meant by reshaping the economy, though. Unions are there to push back against capital, but the adversarial capital v. labor system only really makes sense in a world where there's at least as much work to be done as people.
Of course all else being equal unions are going to look out for their members and their members jobs. It's that or the unemployment lines. However, the society of the future simply won't have those jobs. It will require some new and different social contract. UBI perhaps is an alpha.
As a European, unions being against automation seems like a typical anti-union propaganda point. Can you show me some examples where unions acted out against automatisation?
> unions being against automation seems like a typical anti-union propaganda point.
Yes, when you systematically support terrible ideas, of course your support for terrible ideas will be a common attack against you. What's the surprise there?
It's just that in Germany you more often hear demands for people to be requalified to do other jobs or to send people earlier in pension than outright opposition to progress. In general unions seem to be very interested here in the well-being of the companies, because that helps them get high wages and secure jobs. On the other hand companies also seem way more fine with collaboration with unions (not that there is no conflict either).
"TTI would become the fourth automated container terminal in Southern California. Total Terminals International’s (TTI’s) decision this week to automate its 385-acre Pier T terminal in Long Beach sets up a classic struggle between terminal operator employers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).
"The union opposes the project on the grounds it will eliminate some dockworker jobs, but employers say automation is needed to increase capacity and keep the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles competitive."
[...]
ILWU Local 10 in 2019 tried unsuccessfully to convince the city of Los Angeles to block a construction project for the APM Terminals automation project.
The uproar comes as a facility operated for Denmark’s Moller-Maersk by APM Terminals plans to use the battery-powered, self-guided cargo handling equipment, which APM contends is a response to the ports’ clean air rules.
[...]
Union members, however, fear the equipment will spread to all terminals and hundreds of jobs will be lost. They contend APM could use manned electric vehicles.
Over 50,000 union workers in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, are set to go on strike if new contracts are not settled. One of the main drivers for the strike action is the fear that robots will gradually displace human operators.
The Culinary Union is just one of many labor unions grappling with how to respond to the spread of automation and artificial intelligence – whether driverless trucks or lifting and sorting machines at warehouses. Alongside the fears automation poses to workers, there are concerns that it is also undermining the very organizations designed to support them: labor unions.
Harry Katz, former dean of the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said automation has reduced unions’ might in many industries by shrinking their membership and making it easier for companies to break or survive a strike. Organized labor is likely to lose further power and membership as a result of the ongoing wave of automation, he said.
Union leaders are concerned about a Boeing campaign known as “Quality Transformation,” which relies on automated processes such as robotic riveting and precision machining to cut down on manufacturing defects. Boeing says such processes make airplane assembly more “mistake-proof.”
Aero Mechanic said Boeing laid out its plans and their potential effect on quality-assurance jobs in November.
“Per the PowerPoint Boeing presented to our union, Boeing estimates their plan will impact 451 QA jobs next year and potentially a similar amount in 2020,” the newspaper reported. “This will not only place a heavier burden on our mechanics but will also eliminate the second set of eyes on thousands of work packages.”
Rising to speak in support of the automation resolution, Alfred Granakis, Local 1250’s convention delegate, stated, “I just want to say a couple of words on this because we have got 78 people in Cleveland doing the work of 770 people from the Rouge and we are out-producing them with 78 people. . . . I am representing more machines than I am men in Cleveland. The thing I would like to see is this changed just a little bit.” He then chided UAW President Reuther: “I wish the Executive Board would be instructed to formulate a policy and inform the local union affected by it.” Reuther responded, “We are completely aware and fully conscious of the problem which the resolution covers. . . . The Ford engine plant is the best example today where they have whole batteries of machines with a fellow on one end and another fellow half a block away with the whole thing mechanized.”
After the UAW convention Granakis again urgently wrote Reuther, “As you are well aware, the problem of production standards is one of a recurring nature and needs eternal vigilance, particularly with the reactionary Ford Motor Company.” In UAW Local 1250’s contract negotiations, automation continued to prove the most intractable issue. “As for the problem of Automation,” Granakis told the UAW President, “except for saying ‘no’ and insisting on more men on the job, I have taken no other position until I hear from you.” In order to capture the Ford negotiators’ attention, and possibly Reuther’s too, Local 1250 leaders sought and received formal approval for a strike authorization request from the Cleveland area UAW regional director.
In addition to high rates of absenteeism and numerous shop-floor grievances, [..] an overwhelming majority (almost 90 percent) of the engine-plant workers voted to authorize a strike in the midst of collective bargaining over automation problems. In 1953 the Ford Cleveland engine plant and foundry had four unauthorized work stoppages; in 1954 there were two unauthorized walkouts. These wildcat strikes idled 1,970 men and resulted in 8,439 lost man-hours. These walkouts comprised the tip of the iceberg of worker discontent over automation.
Solid evidence that many US and at least one Danish union behave that way. It leaves me wondering whether German unions might behave different. (I know their legal environment is different, but I don't know how that changes their incentives.)
> It leaves me wondering whether German unions might behave different
A lot of moderns don't understand the unique role of Germany in the historical pantheon of left wing movements.
Germany has historically been the hotbed of socialist movements, and has a long history of a very strong, well-organized, violent, militant hard left insurgencies. If you were to talk to most communists or socialists in 1900 and ask them what the first communist nation would be, they would answer "Germany". That was always the prize and it was their power base.
So Germany developed a number of techniques to fight against these movements, including codetermination, or the idea that unions be represented in corporate decision making which would give them a stake in the overall health of the firm.
It's no accident that the first iteration of codetermination laws were adopted in 1848, and their modern incarnation goes to 1951, at the beginning of the cold war.
Note that codetermination is the exact opposite of US labor law, which bans management from being union members and thus is virtually designed to create or intensify animosity between non-supervisory and supervisory workers, which frankly seems like a dumb and arbitrary distinction, basically designed to create conflict within the firm. This also explains why US firms are much more resistant to unionization efforts while at the same time they lead the world in things like stock grants to workers, and the U.S. has a large number of worker owned firms as well.
Trade unions in China are controlled by the party and are more likely to promote business interests than worker interests. So the workers don’t really have much say in the manner.
There were lots of awkward conversations when my job in China told all the foreigners that they had to pay the Trade Union dues but would get no benefits from it.
There's a lack of workers in fields that cannot be automated (social jobs, automators, ...) and automation just means that we can produce more efficiently which often lead to an increased demand according to Jevon's Paradox.
As long as our hunger for more is insatiable, there will always be more to be done, than we can do. With less consumption we could easily live with less work. The only problem is that maybe some people will not be qualified enough for work in the future.
> taking the undesirable, low-skill labor is the miss.
This is big co propaganda. These jobs are "undesirable" because corporations won't pay adequate money for doing them.
I know plenty of people who love working simple stuff, there is just no way to feed family out of it.
Given how many billions these companies amass, there is money to pay for those jobs, they just prefer to "outsource" and lie that they can't find people.
You're describing the future that doesn't yet exist, as though it already does. Tesla _tried_ to automate their manufacturing as much as it could and had to give it up. And it's run by some of the same folks who launch people into space and land the rockets afterwards - there was no shortage of technical capability, I'm sure.
Now, I'm not arguing that automation isn't the "future", it is pretty clear that it is, but that future is not here yet, and it won't be unless someone spends 20 years willing it into existence. At this point I'm not sure the US can even do it, and things are rapidly getting worse.
I think the issue with Tesla was the lack of time and capital to automate. Innovating that industry will take a lot of both. I doubt they have given up entirely, just paused because they had to be realistic with the production demands and available time in the timeframe in which they had to produce.
I think the issue with Tesla was the lack of technologies that would let it automate to the desired extent. They have plenty of money now, and they still employ tens of thousands of people. Tech simply doesn't exist yet to do what humans do even for car assembly, let alone anything more complicated or bespoke than that.
If it is the “fall of Rome moment”, I’m not exactly worried. It took nearly a millennium for Rome to fall — and even that depends on whether or not you consider the Holy Roman Empire or the Ottoman Empire to be true successor states.
America surely uses a lot of symbolism from the Roman Republic but I am not so sure they have ever claimed to be the successors to the throne once held by Julius Caesar, as all the other ones mentioned above have.
Im not denying that the eastern part of the Roman Empire continued to flourish, but you can’t ignore that Western Europe stagnated for almost 1000 years.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I'd say a good historical analogues (personal opinion ofc) would be the fall the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The political system was heavily fragmented and easily bought, and essentially foreign countries cheaply bought influence specifically to undermine the country. Selfishness doomed attempts at reform, and doomed the country as a whole.
I think both Citizen's United and the allowance of asymmetric trade with China (e.g. China's currency manipulation, IP theft, restrictions on companies operating in China, etc.) are both symptoms of a much larger problem. The U.S. is being dismantled by the capitalist / owner class for personal profit. Very few decisions are made in the government that promote the long-term health of the system. This trend spans the administrations of both parties all the way back to Nixon.
The underlying question is why? Surely this activity could have started in 1950,1920, 1890 or any other year. What change occurred that seemingly has removed any long term/societal concerns from the minds of leaders?
> Surely this activity could have started in 1950,1920, 1890
It did start in 1890. Read about the Populist Party, Cross of Gold speech, Pullman strike, Haymarket affair, US occupation of the Philippines. All of this started before the 19th century. In any old industrial city, check the date when the old national guard armories were built. Why did large, fortified national guard armories start popping up all over the industrialized parts of the country just before the turn of the 20th century?
In the vein of VectorPath's sibling comment, I highly recommend The People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn.
But I think the reason we are seeing this more front-and-center now is because the effects are starting to become noticeable, and because globalization has made it easier for the rich to not really care as much about their home country's economic success; they'll profit regardless, as long as they've made the right investments in the right places.
I wouldn't go so far as to call it racism, but I do find it somewhat xenophobic to suggest that it is wrong to outsource you work to other countries. Why is a Chinese worker any less worthy of a job than an American one? $1 in in a developing country goes further than $10 in a developed one. Globalization has granted billions of people access to things we take for granted like electricity and heating.
We call ourselves “Developed”. It’s already implicitly throwing in the towel - there is nothing more to be done. We’ve already developed. This entire thinking and it’s psyche in our society feels like straight up propaganda. It used to be first-world and third-world.
Chinese labor force isn’t going to help defend Taiwan by making tank gadgets for them. Investing in Chinese labor has so many issues. If we didn’t have a rust belt (that led to Trumpism), we would have left a better nation to lead the world and maybe we can think about leveraging world wide labor - but this time with fair conditions and well paid workers.
It’s not just US, it is the same in EU and many other G20 nations.
Your thinking is appealing to emotional and not rational understanding of the globalism. Truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
> We call ourselves “Developed”. It’s already implicitly throwing in the towel - there is nothing more to be done. We’ve already developed.
I don't agree with this take. The terms "developed" and "developing" is just a politically correct term to classify countries based on their industrial base.
It's use has less to do with developed countries and everything to do with the need to frame the issue as countries working to get where others already are at the moment.
> This entire thinking and it’s psyche in our society feels like straight up propaganda. It used to be first-world and third-world.
I also don't feel you're right here as well. "Third-world" does not refer to a ranking. It was a classification based on where a nation was with regards to the Cold War. Either they're a NATO and NATO-aligned country, a Warsaw pact and USSR country, or you kept yourself out of the cold war and thus were a part of the third world.
It seems a backwards causation, as in the Third World didn't get money's to build the industrial complex to support cold war era efforts, and thus in current times it became the developing countries, vs the developed ones who got all the war-mongering monies
The Rust Belt was primarily a product of Japan rather than China. It's only a very recent development where Chinese manufacturing jobs could have feasibly benefited American workers. Before the mid 2000s, they were mostly manufacturing cheap trinkets.
Outsourcing also freed how labor pool to other pursuits such as college and white collared jobs. Without a large pool of workers eager to leave to Rust Belt, Silicon Valley may not be the same place that it is today.
I think it's too narrow to talk about it as simply "globalization". Globalization has done some really great things, like lifting millions of people out of poverty. But the US has also failed to keep itself competitive with China, and China has (unfairly, IMO, but I'm of course biased) taken advantage of the US's IP and talent (among other things) in order to increase their global influence and gain leverage over the countries that used to be economically "superior" to China.
I think ideology plays a part in why this is "bad", as well. As an American, I wouldn't mind so much if the next growing superpower believed in democratic principles. As much as I'm happy I was born in and grew up in the US, I wouldn't see a problem with a "better US" growing beyond the US in terms of economic and political power. But I'm not particularly comfortable with the idea of an authoritarian country in that position; China already constantly uses its political clout to censor US citizens and businesses, for example. I expect China's power over citizens of other countries, people who will never even set foot in China, to increase over time, and that worries me quite a bit. It often feels like our only hope is that China makes some huge strategic mistakes, or succumbs to unfixable/unknown structural issues.
This fault lies with the US. Trade and relations normalization was a Cold War strategy to capitalize on the Dino-soviet split and weaken the communist block.
Effectively the us threw open the gates on the hypothesis that it would be a Cold War win and that China would eventually liberalize. This problem was well understood by the 90s but the war on terror ultimately blocked any US policy shifts.
You could argue that Nixon improved relations with China to counter-balance USSR influence during the Cold War.
It was obviously foolish to help China become an economic power since the CCP has been at war with the US since the end of WW2 (2 Taiwan Straits wars, 2 Korean wars, Vietnam war), largely driven by Maoist ideology. (The USSR was involved in stopping the Straits wars to prevent wider conflicts.)
(The USSR dealt with an aggressive CCP by obliterating their forces during a border conflict using overkill. The CCP doesn't understand anything less. The USSR also planned to use nuclear weapons on Beijing around 1969, but the US intervened.)
I followed outsourcing to China in the business press from about 1972 to 2000. I shook my head at the end of each article. But here we are.
What's important to realize is that both the CCP and Russia make public statements and:
1) they're either obviously hyperbolic or
2) they accurately represent their actual plans.
#2 is not well-understood by our politicians for some reason. Pompeo is one of the few people to get it, hence the US' very effective strategy for the CCP during the Trump administration.
Note that China has structural weaknesses that will diminish its power: they import 50% of their energy and food, and have a demographic problem that could cut their population in half. They also have serious flooding issues, with 100,000 questionable dams built since 1945.
And the US can currently only make one F-35 per week, while in WW2 the P-51 was literally stamped out.
> Note that China has structural weaknesses that will diminish its power: they import 50% of their energy and food, and have a demographic problem that could cut their population in half. They also have serious flooding issues, with 100,000 questionable dams built since 1945.
This is the only thing that gives me hope, honestly. The West is too busy trying to play nice for whatever reason[0]. I think the only thing that will save us is China making catastrophic mistakes during their continuing rise to power, or the structural problems you mention that they may not be able to do anything about at this point.
[0] Any thoughts there? You seem to be pretty knowledgeable on this topic. My general assumption is that business interests like where China is going (a richer China means more and more access to a huge market), but don't care about the long-term effects to the US economy. But that sounds too simplistic to be the whole story.
Getting off the gold standard and going to a fiat currency, and going into exponential debt ever since. It stagnated the middle class due to inflation and wages not keeping up (which would have caused more inflation). We needed cheap labor to make goods cheaper and more affordable for the stagnating middle class, so we made favorable trade deals that wiped out manufacturing, which exacerbated the problem. It's just a bunch of added negative feedback loops. Hold on.
Not a view I share but I think the general attitude of this so-called "owner" class roughly this: The average American isn't deserving enough of America's bounty, so why should they be entitled to any of it? If you want something you should work for it; you aren't entitled to it by place of birth.
It’s really not an argument against countries it’s more like an extreme form of “meritocracy” mixed in with various problematic views on resource allocation.
I think the argument here is that you're free to do what you want with your wealth, so if its "leave it all to my kids" then that's totally fine and fairness is irrelevant.
I feel like the turning point was earlier than that. When they replaced Wallace with Truman, they got someone they could lead around by the nose. That was very different from the administrations of FDR and even Hoover. JFK threatened to become an exception, but not for long...
The Chinese governments go/to response is to yell “racism!” whenever China is held to account or attacked.
It’s genius really. They know that so many people have a deep instant response to the cry of racism and the CCP uses that to their advantage.
In this way they masterfully play the west like a fiddle.
They get all the people opposed to racism to stand up for China. And none of these anti Racists have a clue - they think they’re “doing the right thing” when in fact the CCP is laughing itself silly at these useful idiots.
So yeah, “sinophobia” buddy, not a belligerent aggressive authoritarian bully state hell bent on subverting the political systems of the world to control everything. No, “sinophobia”.
Dislike of the CCP is not Sinopobia, just as dislike of the Mob isn't anti-Italian.
So many people really wish the CCP would just loosen their grip a bit so that foreigners/Westerners can have real, two-way relationships with Mainlanders.
Honestly, at least in the circles I frequent, the biggest critics of the CCP are either (non-Mainland) Chinese themselves or Sinophiles. Other people simply don't care that much.
I would suspect what you said is true, but that wasn't my point.
My point was simply that the CCP != China.
They've put a huge amount of propaganda work into trying to conflate criticism of the party with hatred of the country (and by extension, the people in it), to the point where even foreigners start to drink the Kool-Aid.
The U.S. has the best system of governance in the world.
The members of Congress are selected by U.S. citizens and funded by international U.S based companies operating globally. This creates a delicate balance where the interests and goals of all major economies are balanced. The U.S citizens maintain full control of who they vote. At the same time the influencing working trough their mind, and trough their representatives ensures what they decide is for the benefit of the all.
A small fraction of relatively ignorant individuals can vote freely with selfish motives, but the system still works as a global government. Everyone in the world who controls market access or money can have a voice.
Congress is actually highly undemocratic when you look at it. Its heavily biased towards rural states with small populations: Montana has the same amount of senators as California.
Its also a tremendously unpopular institution, the approval ratings have hovered at or below 10% for years.
