>”It’s economically productive for the 1% to maintain a trade relationship with China. The financial incentives don’t help any Americans, and in fact, most of us are hurt by this relationship...”
So true, since its inception with GHW, its execution and realization through Clinton and then once fully engaged the timid, supplicant responses from GW and BO, China has contributed to the stagnation of the blue collar worker on America with the full complicity of Democrats, Republicans and most of Industry and even unions who didn’t oppose their cozy politicians. They all only saw starry dollar signs...
That’s where we are now. People have had enough. That’s why they put up with the guy no one likes because he’s willing to sever that codependent relationship.
Now, if you ask any pol running for the nomination who the greatest threat to America is... it’s not going to be China...
This upcoming presidential election is definitely more interesting due to this issue. My brother is a staunch Democrat, but he's made it clear that he's not voting for them if they put someone up who's soft on China. I suspect he'd be voting 3rd party in that scenario.
I have someone I work with who quite literally mocks people for voting for a 3rd party and actually tries to "shame" them for it, usually using a line like "which means he is voting to keep the incumbent in" (usually with more colorful words about the incumbent and the voter).
Voting 3rd party exercises your right to say you don't like either of the other 2 candidates. I will not argue which candidate it will help, but i think this line of thinking is detrimental to our voting process and wrong to rub in peoples faces.
Can’t you both be right at the same time? Going all in for poker may be interpreted as an exercise of my human rights, but it can also be interpreted as giving all my money to the chip lead.
Of course I don’t wish to argue the efficacy of my poker moves. They are an expression of my free spirit.
> Voting 3rd party exercises your right to say you don't like either of the other 2 candidates
You can say whatever you want, but no one is listening. Voter turnout is so low that the signal of voting 3rd-party is completely lost in the noise of passive non-voting. 3rd-party votes might feel good, but pragmatically (and what is voting except a pragmatic attempt to advance your preferred policy), they are useless.
I encourage everyone on this comment chain to read Clay Shirky's "There is no such thing as a protest vote" [0], and really take it seriously, instead of jumping to thought-terminating cliches by angrily denouncing him as a sheep or whatever. He's right.
"Voting 3rd party exercises your right to say you don't like either of the other 2 candidates"
I actually voted for a third party, i liked better than the other 2. It was not a protest. I did just read your link and won't denounce him as anything, but I do think telling people who vote for someone they like who is not in the main 2 parties that their vote was a "throw-away" is again not a good thing.
We will have to agree to disagree on this. Although it is interesting in some other countries where there are more than 2 parties that do all compete.
In a Presidential election it really depends on the state you vote in. California is going team blue no matter what, Alabama team red. Voting 3rd party in one of those states is not going to change the outcome.
Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin etc the calculation totally changes of course.
Pragmatically every vote is useless. The chances that the election outcome will come down to your single vote are infinitesimal. Every individual vote is a protest vote lost in the noise. So anyone reading this should feel perfectly free to vote their conscience.
Well unfortunately the idealism in voting 3rd party (which I understand) to make a statement can't really stand up to the realities of game theory and the American political landscape.
> this line of thinking is detrimental to our voting process and wrong to rub in peoples faces.
Our voting framework is detrimental to our voting process. The line of thinking that a 3rd party vote is a vote wasted is simply an assessment of reality.
There are only two realistic candidates for President in a given US election. And no matter the reasoning, a vote for third party is equivalent to a half vote for both major candidates.
If you truly find equally unappealing, then a third party vote is a (very quiet) way to voice that opinion. Otherwise, you are giving a half vote to your least preferred option.
I like to think of it as showing up to not vote. You made an effort to express your disappointment that can't just be argued away as 'people are too busy'.
Here in Australia at least I can do that every time and still have my vote go to the lesser evil due to preferences.
As far as fallacies that can be demonstrated to be mathematically incorrect to bright 5-year-olds go, this one is absurdly common.
0 may not be equal to 1, but it isn't equal to -1 either. It takes TWO people changing their vote from <your favored major candidate> to <third-party candidate> to match the effect of one person changing from <your favored major candidate> to <the opposing major candidate>.
Its not a full vote for the incumbent, but it is mathematically equivalent to a half vote for both candidates, so the statement that they are "voting for the incumbent" isn't incorrect.
It’s one of the only issues I agree on with the current president. Unfortunately he doesn’t seem willing to actually be effective, and he doesn’t seem to care about the actual human rights issues. I’m hopeful that he might be willing to get things done though.
I’m genuinely shocked Trump hasn’t capitalized more on the HK situation. It would have been perfect for him to, at the very least, get some major concessions from China. Instead, we’ve been ones suffering.
The guy "no one likes" isn't innocent of China-worship. Guiltier than most. On Jinping: "He is a great leader who very much has the respect of his people. He is also a good man in a 'tough business.'"
Misrepresenting him as "willing to sever that codependent relationship" is harmful. He's just as complicit if not more than most politicians, and most of his actions involving China have been inconsistent and self-serving.
He’s prone to this honne tatemae and it’s hard to know his actual take. I think he’s like a used car salesman who uses and throws whatever cheap trick he has to try to get his way...
> In Japan, honne are a person's true feelings and desires (本音 hon'ne, "true sound"), and tatemae are the behavior and opinions one displays in public (建前 tatemae, "built in front", "façade").
Despite his praise of Xi (IMO it's just part of Trump's "style" of negotiating), he's willingly initiated a trade war. I think that's a good indicator that he's willing to at least threaten decoupling. Trump has taken this much farther than any preceding US president.
> and most of his actions involving China have been inconsistent and self-serving.
I think what we're seeing is a president who is at odds with the intelligence and diplomatic communities. It's truly testing the ideas of who's actually in charge.
The president assumes since he was elected and runs the executive branch that he has the final say on what will be done, and will go "off-script" in direct communications with other leaders to forward his agenda. The diplomats/intelligence have long-established precedents and procedures and want everyone, including the president, to not rock their boat.
When they are unable to work together, you will see these inconsistent decisions being made.
Every US President has had the final say on what will be done, within the laws established by Congress. Including this President.
The problem is this President does not take into account the knowledge and capabilities of his intelligence and diplomatic communities, leading to stupid and naive decisions because the other heads of state are better informed and are better negotiators than him.
The intelligence and diplomatic communities are resources at his disposal he often chooses to ignore, so his screw ups are squarely his own with no one else to blame.
How is that a misrepresentation? He's started a trade war with them. In a world with a few nations with ICBMs it's often valuable to maintain some semblance of respect with countries capable of destroying you, even when initiating a trade war. Most people didn't enjoy the cold war.
He started a trade war with the country. He isn't just one thing, but idk how people are forgetting the last year and a half so quickly on the run up to Christmas. This guy is notorious for being 'post truth' and making off colour jokes which is bad, but what he says is surely quieter than what he does?
> On Jinping: "He is a great leader who very much has the respect of his people. He is also a good man in a 'tough business.'"
Praising him doesn't mean he likes him or he'll make of him his friend. It's more of a respect thing. He respects the man for working on the interest of his country.
"Good man" implies moral endorsement, and Jinping isn't working in the "interest of his country," he's working in the interest of Han Chinese. "Hitler was a great man!" is a totally appropriate thing to say using the logic you're applying.
I mean, "Alexander the Great" was a great man by common definition. That should be pretty obvious. I'd expand that to other great conquerors - Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and many others.
Does Hitler really not belong on a list like that? So would Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt, of course - but I don't think greatness requires goodness.
Or from popular culture:
> “The wand chooses the wizard, remember … I think we must expect great things from you, Mr Potter … After all, He Who Must Not Be Named did great things – terrible, yes, but great.” - Ollivander
Pretty disingenuous don't you think? We all know trump says a lot of bullshit and contradictory things. He isn't Obama who was really good with his words.
But if all you have is trump saying "good strong leader", then you don't have much. Show actions not words.
Trump abandoned the TPP which would have put actual pressure on China in favor of this visible trade war which is nothing more than a tax on American consumers.
Even Bernie Sanders was against TPP. Do you also think he's in bed with the Chinese government?
Chinese economy is definitely struggling. I don't buy the argument that the trade wars do not work. They hurt both sides. Question is who does it hurt more?
It feels like you haven't thought of it in a game theoretic perspective. In the classical prisoner paradox, the two prisoners gain the most by collaboration. But if one of the prisoner shows no good faith collaboration, it might be necessary for the other prisoner to also stop putting their faith in the uncollaborative one.
Sanders is an ideologue who was against the TPP on anti-business position and nothing to do with its impact on China.
The TPP set up an alliance between all of the players in that region and explicitly left out China in order to give that group negotiation power over China. But nuanced policy debate is dead in America so let's use the tool that fucks us all.
The worst part about the trade deal is the harm on our agricultural sector, but I guess at least they voted for their own demise.
This is how negotiations work. It's rarely productive to simply trash and call out the guy on the other side in speeches from the top level. The real sticks and carrots are mostly in fine print and smaller-time negotiations. They call him "unsophisticated", but how sophisticated are the people who think that public speeches towards you geopolitical rivals really mean what they say?
The problem with Trump is that he says many different things at different times which are contradictory and then people hone in on one thing over another. His actions too are contradictory, he has tried to curry personal favor with Xi whilst engaging with a trade war with the same.
The article focuses on human rights abuses which I think is a cogent criticism of China-US trade.
On the economics issue though, readers should know he disagrees with economists, who nearly universally agree that trade with China benefits Americans as a whole, with the caveat that there are concentrated losses in certain populations. Economists are highly certain on this, with uncharacteristically few people responding "uncertain" on the survey [0]. You can go through the other surveys on the IGM Forum to see what more common distributions looks like.
I’m not sure these economists have spent time in the Rust Belt, then. Entire cities were economically destroyed from the offshoring of jobs to China and other low-cost areas.
Modern economists are completely out-of-line with reality on many things, "life outside of George Mason University" being one of them.
Pick your flavor of elitist sub/urbanism, it doesn't matter, none are substantially different.
(HN's poor Markdown formatter transfers asterisks cross-paragraph, so what was originally "George Mason University (asterisk)" and "(asterisk)Pick your flavor" just made everything between italicized.)
It's not just China. It started with Japan, and even without China, it will continue in Pakistan, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and eventually it will be replaced by automation.
So we know international trade is a thing and we know specialization is a thing. We know economies will over time become more value add and go up the chain.
That’s not a problem if we put in place policies and regulations that put our workers on even footing with foreign workers. Benefits, protections (OSHA), anti-dumping, market-based pay (no institutional labor), IP protections, even access to markets, etc. that is handicap any imports proportionately for not meeting those baselines.
But don't a lot of people who live in the Rust Belt shop at Walmart and benefit from cheaper prices generally? I haven't seen any "made in America" competitor to Walmart that's thriving because there's so much demand from customers who are willing to pay more to buy domestic made goods.
Having access to cheap goods might not make up lost jobs, but weren't most of the manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt automated away rather than being offshored? Since 1990, production of metals in the U.S. has held roughly constant, but the number of people employed in the industry has fallen steadily. So it's not like the steel mill jobs from the Rust Belt were shipped overseas, they were just automated away.
The Rust Belt lost most of its jobs prior to 1990, so I’m not sure how that’s relevant data.
I find it a bit hard to understand how someone could suggest that having access to garbage cheap Walmart goods would make up for the utter destruction of a region’s economy. A good place to observe this is southwestern Pennsylvania: there are hundreds of former industrial towns which are now almost completely empty. Drug use is also rampant in these areas and indeed it’s easy to make a direct connection between offshoring jobs and the opioid epidemic.
Foreign trade policy is not defined via consumer preferences. It's the exactly the same as for environmentally sound products: the burden is not on consumers to choose better, but on government to regulate the market.
Umm...economists know all about this. I taught international trade classes out in North Carolina. Talked to numerous people affected by the loss of textile manufacturing. There's a massive literature, going back decades, on the topic.
I wish there was a way to raise the level of discussion on HN. Instead, completely uninformed comments like this get upvoted.
Perhaps my comment was a bit dismissive, but I think the general point stands: academic economists don’t live in the places that have been economically ruined by offshoring jobs. University professors are white-collar professionals and don’t live in run-down, economically-dead towns.
It’s easy to draw abstract analyses from afar, but without actual hands-on experience, you end up with unexpected side effects - like the current rise of populist protectionism.
Your comment seems very anti-intellectual, which is surprising to find on HN. Academics do not need to live in a place in order to study it rigorously.
Not being blasé, but the rust-belt is the trade-off for globalization. The US asked the rest of the world to open up their markets for American goods and services and promised to do the same.
The attitude that “it’s just a trade off” is exactly the problem with abstract analysis. Millions of people in the Rust Belt lost their livelihoods and thousands of cities were economically destroyed. Maybe it was overall beneficial for Americans, but that isn’t the point I’m making.
The point is that academic economists pushed policies that had unintended side effects (populism and protectionism) that perhaps they would have anticipated if they had actual experience in the areas that were affected.
Finally, there’s a difference between merely studying a place from afar and enacting policies that dramatically affect said place.
>Finally, there’s a difference between merely studying a place from afar and enacting policies that dramatically affect said place.
Economists do not enact those policies -- they suggest policies. The fisherman also suggests policies to benefit his own work, just as the steel worker suggests his own policies, and just as the architect, the construction crews, the parents, the etc..
These policies are aggregated, and enacted, by your politician (of cascading hierarchy), whose job is to do that -- review the possible set of policies and their impact on different areas of his total domain, and with this overarching view, enact policies. The fisherman does not himself review his policies for how they would impact the steel worker, and neither does the economist review his policies for how they will impact the presidential election.
If your local politician is blindly following the recommendations of the economist, without concern for the rest of his domain, whose fault is that but the politician's?
The economist is not supposed to be an expert in all things about the world, and it would be absurd to imagine him to be. He is intended to be an expert of his domain (economics), and is meant to be one of many experts, each supplying their own, scoped, understanding of the world.
If the economist claims that his suggested policies will purely benefit all aspects of the economy, and have zero negative impact, then it would be fair to blame him, because he was plainly incorrect about the area he's intended to be an expert in. But if he fairly claimed that it would generally be beneficial, but certain areas of the economy would be impacted negatively in such a fashion, and his predictions are generally correct, then he has done his job without fault. The decision to enact the policy, knowing the benefits and the losses, is not made by him.
> The point is that academic economists pushed policies
Sure, the Chicago school of economics has been banging this particular drum for ages, but it found a responsive ear in the "deciders" in both public and private spheres from the late-80's.
This rust-belt is a symptom on ongoing class warfare, pure and simple - China only happens to be a tool (and a convenient scape goat). The global domination of Wall Street and Silicon Valley is the flip-side of the globalism coin.
I'd say on average the US benefitted, but this hasn't been evenly distributed (capital wins). How do you fix that without using any big-government, pinko communist/socialist interventions? (being sarcastic here, but that's ironically a big part of rust-belt politics).
I don't see how it was anti-intellectual. The reality is some combination of trade policy, automation and massive income inequality led us to electing a narcissistic reality TV star to be President.
The bargain of cheaper goods in return for us moving up the value chain may be good for GDP, but we have left tens of millions behind in the process, and they are pissed.
I am pro free-trade, but we need to come up with a system that more equally distributes the gains. You can't kick millions of people out of work, leave them to fend for themselves and not expect massive societal issues.
>Academics do not need to live in a place in order to study it.
I mean, pretty sure biologists would disagree. Maybe economists need to rethink their trade if that’s the prevailing mindset. The idea that you are modeling a social structure that you don’t think you need to have ever been a part of or experienced is pretty rich.
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that the US opened its arms to free trade and the rest of world shrugged and took advantage. Non-reciprocal free trade might be good for the US economy on the whole, but when a handful of people control half the wealth, and their half is the part of the economy that reaps the benefit while everyone else sees full time employment harder to come by and inflation adjusted wages stand still for 3 decades, I think it’s probably a bad policy for a democratic republic.
> my impression is that the US opened its arms to free trade and the rest of world shrugged and took advantage.
The rest of the world also took hits in some industries - US farm subsidies destroyed corn farming in poor countries
Different US industries fared differently - without globalization, Silicon Valley (and American tech in general) as well as Wall street wouldn't be as globally dominant as they are
> I think it’s probably a bad policy for a democratic republic.
I think it could work great for a democratic republic with sane corporate tax and safety net policies to more evenly distribute the upside
>I think it could work great for a democratic republic with sane corporate tax and safety net policies to more evenly distribute the upside
True. But how would modern medicine have faired?
I think the bigger issue with globalization is that it has a huge environmental impact and makes our species more susceptible to the effects of climate change.
We ought to at least enforce free trade policy better; I can tell you first hand that competing against unregulated competitors in manufacturing is hilariously unfair. If we really cared about the Environment or Human rights we would at least level the playing field in markets we control. It’s cheaper to buy from China largely because of our regulatory environment.
It's not clear to me that people discussing the overall economy should also be charged with discussing the political outcomes of the outcome -- that's the role of the politician who chooses to act on the data provided by the economist.
That is, it's not the economists job to predict that the demolishment of the rust belt will lead to Trump's election; their job is to predict that the demolishment of the rust belt will bolster the coastal cities, and improve the health of the American economy in general.
Also notably, towns come and go based the industries they support -- it has happened in the past, and will happen in the future. It's simply the inevitable outcome of an ever-evolving economy. How to mitigate the impact of that fact is not the really job of the economist.
And economists are not expected to live in the towns they discuss.. the local politician is intended to represent the local concerns. If he's failing to do so, or failing to have any impact, the economist can merely say "this is what will probably happen, if you do this and don't do that", and nothing will happen.
Some of those low cost areas are in the country. A lot of the Rust Belt jobs moved within the USA to the South (especially with the auto industry), which is one of the reasons top line US industrial production is pretty stable/growing but you have some very obvious depressed industrial regions.
Where do you think the jobs in the rust belt came from?
The same thing happened to artisan economies with factories during modernization, yet people didn't decry the loss of the local blacksmith when the rust belt took over their jobs too.
The transition from local to city to regional to global specialization is a natural effect of economies of scale. Trying to freeze economic development and preserve the status quo is like trying to push water uphill.
There was most certainly massive push back against industrialization. The Luddite movement being one obvious example.
In the US we ended up with 40 hour work weeks, and universal high school as a government response. We will need similar large measures to deal with globalization and automation this time as well.
Precisely, and as the history of automation has shown, having a social safety net to retrain and shift workers is critical.
Unfortunately the focus is on blaming immigrants and other countries, not helping the disenfranchised American workers get back on their feet. It's easier to be an angry luddite but it's also historically the wrong side to be on.
At the city and regional levels, workers could at least go where the added jobs are and compete on the same terms (regulations and cost of living). At the global level that’s rarely permitted.
> On the economics issue though, readers should know he disagrees with economists, who nearly universally agree that trade with China benefits Americans as a whole, with the caveat that there are concentrated losses in certain populations.
The thing is: economists are hardly unbiased and neutral. Their theories are far from scientific truth, and typically embed significant political content.
For instance: "benefit" can be a highly political term. How do "economists" define it and is that the definition we should be using?
> Paul Krugman and other mainstream trade experts are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization: It hurt American workers far more than they thought it would. Did America’s free market economists help put a protectionist demagogue in the White House?
There are winners and losers in every decision, and I've already acknowledged there are concentrated losses among certain populations. It hurt certain sectors of manufacturing, yes, but as you can see pulling back from trade hurts a different set of American workers[0][1], and may not even be benefiting the manufacturing sector[2]. Manufacturing is not a simple "I make things or you make things", with free trade it's a cooperative process and protectionism affects inputs to manufacturing as well[3].
Without belaboring the argument which I'm sure everyone's seen before, I would like to re-focus on the point of my comment: The idea that "The financial incentives don’t help any Americans, and in fact, most of us are hurt by this relationship" is counter to everything we know about economics. You can give counter examples yes, but overall trade has been a benefit to Americans, especially for lower-income Americans who rely on low cost goods. We can say with our engineering jobs that we're willing to bear the cost of protectionism, but we don't really bear that cost in the first place.
> There are winners and losers in every decision, and I've already acknowledged there are concentrated losses among certain populations.
Decisions are political, and these decisions have been, more or less, presented to the losers as a fait accompli by the winners. It is good and right that such a decision be challenged, and that it potentially be moderated or rolled back entirely.
These decisions also have had important effects outside of the areas typically focused on by "economists" that need to be taken into account.
> The idea that "The financial incentives don’t help any Americans, and in fact, most of us are hurt by this relationship" is counter to everything we know about economics.
The thing is, it's not inaccurate to say economics is a political ideology. We should speak about it honestly: as politics and not science. So it's more accurate to say that idea is "counter to everything we know about [my?] political ideology."
Posting links to blogs from explicitly libertarian think tanks that quote chapter and verse does little to convince me economics is something other than politics by another name.
The scientific side of economics is the description of the properties and behavior of economics systems. The political side is what we should do with this information. I think I and the sources I've cited have kept largely to the former, and I'm the only one in the comment chain to at least throw up a graph. Call it what you want, but we should be able to make observations on systems. At the very least it's a step up from say, pointing out that a source comes from libertarians.
> The scientific side of economics is the description of the properties and behavior of economics systems. The political side is what we should do with this information.
No, sorry. It's not that clean cut. Your links had economists stating things like "America’s low-income households benefit the most from free trade and having access to cheap imports." But defining good as having access to cheaper goods is an intensely political statement (even ignoring the fact that statement was made though an organization advocating for a particular political policy).
If economics was not political, economists would merely say things like "All else being equal, if our models are correct, increased tariffs will lead to increased domestic prices of international trade goods. However, all else is not equal, so we cannot comment if tariffs are good policy or not."
> "America’s low-income households benefit the most from free trade and having access to cheap imports."
This is a description of a property or behavior of a system.
> But defining good as having access to cheaper goods is an intensely political statement
This would be apolitical in all but the most semantic of arguments. "Buying the things I want to buy" is assumed to be a good thing by the vast majority of people.
>> But defining good as having access to cheaper goods is an intensely political statement
> This would be apolitical in all but the most semantic of arguments. "Buying the things I want to buy" is assumed to be a good thing by the vast majority of people.
That's a myopic view: it's not the only good thing, and it's arguable that it's not even the most important good thing. The politics are embedded in the shape of the myopia.
If it wasn’t China, the US would be importing goods from elsewhere.
It’s unlikely the response to not China will be America.
There are reasons to believe the US should still do not China even if it means Bangladesh or Vietnam (in fact, this is exactly what the TPP was supposed to have achieved, and would have better protected worker rights as well as IP...but I guess that wasn’t blunt enough for America).
The US is wealthier than it has ever been thanks to trade abroad. It makes absolutely no sense that the country that has overall benefited the most from trade, is complaining about it.
What the US hasn’t done, is spread the benefits of trade internally. The US economic problems stem from whatever led to a small percentage of the economy pocketing the vast gains. It’s far more likely that tax changes, regulatory changes, and changes in union power have a lot more to do with that than anything else.
But it’s always easier to blame Johnny Foreigner and people have been doing it for millennia, so there’s no reason to believe the US would be immune from it.
"If it wasn’t China, the US would be importing goods from elsewhere."
Other places don't cheat with market access or steal IP anywhere as much as China. Any economic rebalancing would have been far more gradual.
"What the US hasn’t done, is spread the benefits of trade internally. The US economic problems stem from whatever led to a small percentage of the economy pocketing the vast gains."
You mean policies such as open trade with China, which was inherently biased towards profits to the top, given the way offshoring worked?
This does not mean there weren't other factors at work, rather that China trade was one policy in an array of policies with a similar outcome.
"But it’s always easier to blame Johnny Foreigner and people have been doing it for millennia, so there’s no reason to believe the US would be immune from it. "
My country profited from the US's Free Trade advocacy, and I still think the US's China policy was either insane or driven by elite concerns. It's one thing to have free trade, another to have one-way free trade with a country that cheated so openly, and is now a superpower competitor.
> The US is wealthier than it has ever been thanks to trade abroad.
And more unequal than it has been since the Gilded Age, when the infamous robber-barons ruled the economy unrestrained.
As you said, the US hasn't "spread the benefits of trade internally", but that has a lot to do with globalization. Workers lost bargaining power and income as competition for their jobs increased due to globalization, and unions became weak when companies responded to strikes by moving operations overseas.
The benefits of globalization naturally flow to foreign workers and the few Americans in charge, while the cost of globalization falls on American workers.
Agree with you. That's how free market-based economic works, seeking maximum return. Inside an economy, free market tends to increase economic inequality and monopoly, which seems to be the major source of many things going on (Trump elected, protests in HK, France). When this happens, blaming Johnny Foreigner is easier..
>If it wasn’t China, the US would be importing goods from elsewhere.
I don't see the problem. USA has practically no leverage in the trade relationships with China. They can't change China for the better. So cutting China off is a net benefit even if other countries will take its role. That also means USA can now trade with countries that actually respect American laws and do in fact share American values like democracy or human rights.
This idea that we must sell our soul for a small profit must die.
> The thing is: economists are hardly unbiased and neutral. Their theories are far from scientific truth, and typically embed significant political content.
That may be true, but are there any less biased and more neutral experts on the economy to turn to, or do we just throw up our hands and say that no one knows anything about the economy and thus all opinions are equally valid?
I do not trust economists on this issue. Many doctors and even prestigious academics and journals are openly admitting that aspects of medicine have been compromised by the processed food industry and pharmaceutical industry. I posit that economics has been even more compromised by multinational corporations and financial entities, but economics is such an insular "science" that they've just built their ivory tower up higher to hide more and more bullshit.
The main benefit that they give for Americans is that everything became cheaper. We can buy cheaper phones, appliances, cars, clothing, and household goods. But that's exactly what most of these things are - cheaper. We're importing a vast quantity of crappy junk, exporting untold pollution and human suffering onto factory workers and laborers in China, and hollowing out the American middle class in the process.
When presented with evidence about the declining quality and huge externalities of imported goods, they hand-wave about rational actors and price discovery and how consumers will just select for the products that minimize heavy metal pollution in some far off mine in rural China. There's similar hand-waving about how Americans will simply find new jobs when all the factories in Ohio automate or close. When products die more frequently because they're not engineered for durability or serviceability, they hand wave again about how consumers are making informed decisions to maximize their utility at the time of purchase.
The truth is a lot of this was a great con with a thin veneer of respectable economics on it. A few of the economists were in on the con, but most of them were taken for a ride. There were a few warning us all along about market failures, wealth inequality, disruption of rapid globalization, and unchecked externalities, but most just wanted in on the money.
Mainstream macroeconomics still have problems dealing with real returns of capital investment and technology improvements. And free commerce with China creates some quite large unnatural changes on both of those factors. (And microeconomics can't save the day here.)
So, well, I would add disclaimer to not blindly trusts the economists on this one. Their opinion are probably much better than the one from the average Joe, and also much better than anything you'll get out of the news or a politician's mouth, but not completely reliable either... and the most certain a economist is of it, the less I would trust him.
I am still shocked by how many people do not give Trump credit for putting China on the political issue radar. Both sides of the aisle were destroying the American economy and middle class, and literally no one was talking about it. The guy has issues, and even if he fails in his endeavors, he brought trade and immigration into the national conversation. For all we know, he saved the USA
Because automation is an even bigger factor in the decline of manufacturing jobs than China. Because focusing on China specifically will not lead to outsourced jobs coming back to the US when there are many, many other countries with cheap labor (many cheaper than China at this point). Because even if you banned foreign trade altogether, automation would probably happen 10x faster since then the incentives would be so high. Because manufacturing has many steps, and sometimes the US is in the middle (buy steel from China, make motorcycle, sell to Europe) and lack of access to trade can put these jobs in jeopardy. Because even if by some miracle all these issues disappear, manufacturing is a small percent of employment so you don't fix the problems for the rest of the middle/lower class.
Because the expenses that are killing us (housing, health care, education) aren't outsourced at all.
As far as I can tell (and according to most economists), the idea that "we can fix the middle class by going after China trade" is intuitive, simple, and wrong. And it's popular on both sides of the aisle. And historically, it's always been easier to find some group to blame than to fix structural economic issues.
So I think the further we go along this path, the less likely it is we will end up fixing our actual problems, and the more likely countries will be distracted by trade wars and maybe real wars in various parts of the world as those problems increase, and various groups are blamed instead of fixing economic policy.
This is separate from the human rights issues. But I think if we want to put penalties to try to address the human rights issues, we should be clear about that. Because if the penalty is for other political reasons it doesn't add an incentive to improve human rights, since that wouldn't make the penalty go away.
The alternative to allowing manufacturing to move to China is higher prices for goods in the United States. Instead of having really cheap TVs, TVs are more expensive -- they are manufactured here.
Why would we want this?
Because the alternative is a destruction of the USA manufacturing sector. Moving those jobs overseas only helps two groups:
1.) The Chinese
2.) The owners of capital in America, high up business men (the so described 1%).
The third group who may be helped, are everyday Americans who benefit from cheap goods.
What would imposing large tariffs do?
Goods are more expensive, so people can buy less. TVs, Clothes, Cars etc are more expensive. But middle class Americans keep middle class jobs. Right now the policies are ultra capitalist, the middle class is being gutted and replaced with a heroin epidemic.
Why dont we replace their jobs and retrain the workers?
The retraining of older workers for new industries has never been shown to work. Its an economic theory that has yet to play out in any economy on a large scale. I believe the root of Americas economic woes among the middle classes is this concept, which was conceived of and pushed hard in the 90s. Behind the scenes academics like Noam Chomsky fought hard against this concept, but the arguments never trickled down into the public.
In short, tariffs stop the outsourcing and middle class destruction. Things get more expensive, we accept that. If automation kills the jobs here, it still holds off the destruction of the middle class for another 15 - 30 years. Which is better than nothing.
For your argument to make sense, I'm going to assume by "China" you actually mean "all inexpensive 3rd world countries". So this isn't about the current trade war but tariffs in general.
I agree that retraining doesn't work. But I disagree that stopping trade can save the middle class. Manufacturing is only 7.9% of jobs [1] and stopping all trade will only slow the decline, with huge amounts of collateral damage for other jobs. Almost all jobs used to be in farming, but now they aren't. Manufacturing isn't going to be something that employs a huge number of people anymore. In China they're automating away jobs that pay $10,000 a year.
How are you going to help retail workers, 9.8% of jobs [1], as automation (Amazon warehouses) takes their jobs? Tariffs don't help them any although they'll pay for them.
There's real problems for the middle class and/or certain geographic regions, but stopping trade is a solution that almost no economists think will work. I'd rather try something more promising like UBI.
The 1% are above any state. They will align with any state that gives them favorable tax loopholes. If America clamps down they will just leave. Look at Eduardo Saverin for example.
> The 1% are above any state. They will align with any state that gives them favorable tax loopholes. If America clamps down they will just leave. Look at Eduardo Saverin for example.
The ability for an individual to choose their favored tax jurisdiction is an artifact of law, and laws can be changed. If America decides to clamp down on the 1%, it can also create laws to disincentivize leaving for tax reasons, like Saverin did.
Given the condition of the lowest of our nation, "traitors" isn't an unreasonable way to describe the 1%, and no one in the 1% has ever seen a firing squad or the electric chair. Not even lethal injection. If they aren't subject to the same rules as Americans, are they really Americans? If they have a higher amount of wealth than sovereign countries, can they be considered anything but sovereign?
1% of the US population is something like 3 million people; let's say about 2 million adults. Do you really think that there are 2 million adults in the US who have "a higher amount of wealth than sovereign countries" and that the US should go and execute 2-3 million of its citizens?
> Do you really think that there are 2 million adults in the US who have "a higher amount of wealth than sovereign countries" and that the US should go and execute 2-3 million of its citizens
Germany did in the 40s. There's a
reason this rhetoric popular with the socialists in the US sounds very familiar.
Actually, the number of German citizens (or ex-German-citizens, given that German Jews were stripped of citizenship) executed by the Third Reich was "only" about 200,000-300,000 [1], which was about 0.3-0.4% of the population (~70 million). So sort of in the ballpark of "1%", but not even close to 2-3 million, given the much smaller population.
Lots more killing of non-German citizens, of course...
most of the job losses of blue-collar work are the result of automation, not foreign trade (this is a statement for which ample evidence exists[1]), furthermore on the aggregate Americans do benefit from trade with not just China but also other low-cost nations, which again is economics 101. If the United States were to produce goods at the level of domestic wages a small segment of the workforce would benefit, but consumers on average would lose out due to the increase in price. The price for an iPhone could go from ~850$ to ~2000$[2]. Now imagine that this happens for every good that is produced largely in China and think again if bringing back a few ten thousand jobs is worth the total loss of consumer welfare in the states.
Also, it goes without saying of course that it would also hurt the Chinese workers who are equally deserving of good employment as their American counterparts, and it's not clear why discounting their welfare is anything other than tribalism.
I, and I’m sure many many others, would be willing to pay a little more if I know that money is staying here and supporting families in this country. I can do without more plastic crap from China, and I consider it strategically important that high tech manufacturing comes back to the US. For defense reasons, among others. I’m sure someone will link the Wikipedia page with some neat plots from “economics 101”, which is fine. But some things are worth paying a little more for.
Well you may be fine if you have a lot of disposable income, but many poor Americans will not. Which is of course the opposite story that the OP tried to tell. If you are a minimum wage US worker paying hundreds of dollars more for basic goods is a drastic cut into your quality of life.
This mercantilism on display here will be extremely harmful to people in America who rely on low cost imported goods just for the sake of predominantly wealthy people attempting to play geopolitics. If you're willing to harm poor Americans and cut trade then please state it like this, don't wrap it up in patriotism.
And to expand on the 'jobs coming back'. Given the high production costs that American companies would have to live with would instantly make their products unattractive in the rest of the world, where people are still going to buy Chinese phones. Giving companies like Apple an incentive to drastically increase the pace of automation, which again is the primary eliminator of jobs.
And even worse, unless you put a tariff on Samsung who will still produce in countries with access to cheap labour, american products will be uncompetitive in their own markets. If you do eliminate competition, the incentive to innovate will vanish. This in fact already happened in the US in the 80s, when the Reagan administration engaged in a trade-war with the Japanese to protect the automotor industry. We all know what this did to the american car market as a result.
>That Americans are poor is likely a consequence of the current trade imbalances.
This story is improbable because the overwhelming majority of America's poorest are employed in the domestic service industry who are not facing negative exposure to international trade. Every store clerk, every McDonalds worker, every garbage man, cleaning lady, janitor, nanny, teacher and so on will be one-sided losers of an increase in prices due to reduced trade.
The benefactors will be a relatively small number of American manufacturing workers (given that it's overall only a small source of employment), who already earn solidly middle-class wages.
In places like the oil boom towns in west Texas and South Dakota the average salaries for all jobs are multiplied higher. Because the average worker in an oilfield makes so much more they have to pay the cashiers 4x what they normally would make. You are wrong.
there is no such scenario because manufacturing would not have stayed. As explained in my original post, automation constitutes the bulk of replacement of manufacturing jobs. If every single manufacturing job from China came back to the United States we would be talking about a low single digit percentage number of the american workforce.
What if they are only in those jobs because there are no factory jobs for them? If we started employing a lot of factory workers, they would have to come from somewhere. A lot would come from worse jobs. This would also make labor scarcer for those jobs allowing the people who do them to demand higher wages and better conditions.
> Well you may be fine if you have a lot of disposable income, but many poor Americans will not.
Why are they poor? Hasn't globalization directly contributed to making the American working class poorer? For instance: Offshoring a factory obviously eliminates those workers' jobs. The owner of a American factory can also use the threat of offshoring to keep wages down. The owner is better off, but the workers clearly aren't.
One of the obnoxious things about free-trade ideology is that the cause of problems and the proposed solutions often seem to be one and the same: more market faster.
> Hasn't globalization directly contributed to making the American working class poorer?
My understanding is that our standard of living has continued to increase throughout my lifetime, and thus that the American working class is on the whole richer than it was decades ago.
> The owner is better off, but the workers clearly aren't.
Aren't they? If they make $10/hour instead of $15/hour, but the goods they buy are 40% the cost that they would have been, their $10/hour is effectively $16/hour (I think I got the math right there).
Of course, maybe they are making $9/hour, or maybe they lost their jobs after all, or maybe the goods they buy are 95% the cost that they would have been … but the principle still holds that they can be doing less well than they would like but still better than they were.
> Aren't they? If they make $10/hour instead of $15/hour, but the goods they buy are 40% the cost that they would have been, their $10/hour is effectively $16/hour (I think I got the math right there).
I think it's a mistake to treat it like a math equation, since (among other things) that engages in the fallacy of equating Homo economicus with Homo sapiens.
But if you do want to treat it like a math equation like that. The workers may still be worse off because they don't just buy trade goods. The owner's income didn't drop, and maybe increased, so he can use greater relative income to bid up non-trade goods like real estate, healthcare, and education, pushing those things out of reach of the workers.
Not everyone is as materialistic as you. The goods you are talking about are luxury products we can do without - have you read of the sacrifices people make on the homefront during all out war? Even basic necessities such as food are rationed. To complain about not having the newest iPhone is a slap in the face of the sacrifices made by our ancestors in order to endure the world wars and stave off facism.
You will be surprised how materialistic the average American will be when their basic cost of living increases.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say in your post, that you'd like to live like a WW2 soldier on the homefront rationing food without a phone? Or that you think there is majority support for your romanticised wartime lifestyle?
The replies to my original post are getting increasingly strange and unhinged
Poor Americans in the rust belt are poor largely because of the decimation of a path to the middle class.
So now we need to keep the status quo because they are no longer middle class?
Your argument doesn’t make sense and until you understand that Trump wins re-election easily.
Even if he was not particularly effective in improving their lot, at least he followed through on his promises instead of preaching to them how raping them was good for them.
Yeah I don’t agree with any of this. I find it really fascinating that, after WWII, the US finds itself in this self-imposed fatalism where we can “never” compete with the rest of the world on manufacturing because of labor costs. It’s also a little odd because in multiple threads at a near daily pace I see people advocating that we explicitly cut back on consumption spending for environmental reasons (reasons I find very compelling). China is also one of the, if not the, world’s biggest polluter.
The Apple example is a good one, but, again, I find it very hard to believe that an 80% (or hell even 90%) automated manufacturing footprint here in the US is a) infeasible and/or b) undesirable relative to the status quo.
I’m tired of the fatalism about this issue. It’s pathetic and signals that America is near collapse if we are essentially just giving up on our industrial base and willing to be reliant on cheap consumer goods from China.
The US isn't near collapse at all. The postwar era and the fact that the US is the primary consumer of global goods is a different way of saying that the US is one of the most prosperous countries on the planet.
The US could compete with foreign countries on manufacturing, but not through human labour unless you want Americans to work 9/9/6 in hazardous conditions and under environmental degradation. The dematerialisation of the US economy has made it cleaner, more energy-efficient, less physically demanding, and richer, because it extracts value from its global IP, and it has given Chinese workers a step up the ladder to prosperity. If manufacturing is coming back its in the form of robots, and that does very little for displaced workers.
There is no reason for fatalism because the premise is all wrong that deindustrialisation is bad. It's not. The problem the US has is a cultural one where the vision of the Ford company man working the same job at the conveyor belt with a dog and car and a house in the suburbs hasn't been updated. Adjust the political system to compensate the segments of the population that lose out, find different ways to provide meaningful work, and we'll be better off, instead of making everyone worse off.
“We consume a lot of goods therefore we are prosperous.”
Utter nonsense. I implore you to actually hang out in, not just visit, these places that got blown up so that some companies could make some basis points on their quarterly returns.
It’s also amazing that you’re saying that the “cultural” hangings on about the mid 20th century are something to be readjusted. Dude, these people are not going to become firmware engineers at night school. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting what was a normal family life at that time to exist in 2019. If your claim is that that is not possible, then declare what sacrifices are required. Did globalism make this impossible?
Exactly. This is the template for emerging economies. Grow your domestic economy, have your consumers support your industry. That’s the recipe, but suddenly this is “bad” for our own economy and people.
> Now imagine that this happens for every good that is produced largely in China and think again if bringing back a few ten thousand jobs is worth the total loss of consumer welfare in the states.
On the other hand, perhaps a reduction in frivolous consumption would be good for an ailing planet.
> it's not clear why discounting their welfare is anything other than tribalism.
They are citizens of an authoritarian regime, and for the most part, deeply nationalistic. Their labor produces the regime's prosperity, and enables the very economic influence that leads the international community to constantly turn a blind eye to its human rights abuses.
I don't think it's controversial or inhumane to suggest that we should allocate resources to those who play by (or belong to groups that play by) fairer rules.
That's certainly the traditional narrative, but it always smelled a bit fishy to me because I've seen far more success in outsourcing manufacturing than I've seen in automating it. Sure enough:
Both are definitely contributing, but automation/process improvements is very apparent in steel production: "In the 1980s, American steelmakers needed 10.1 man-hours to produce a ton of steel; now they need 1.5 man-hours, says Joe Innace of S&P Global Platts." https://apnews.com/cae426730cd74e64932e4be7fa5cdebc/As-Trump...
Or in Austria: "The plant, a two-hour drive southwest of Vienna, will need just 14 employees to make 500,000 tons of robust steel wire a year—vs. as many as 1,000 in a mill with similar capacity built in the 1960s."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-21/how-just-...
>”it goes without saying of course that it would also hurt the Chinese workers who are equally deserving of good employment as their American counterparts...”
You know what, I’ll start caring about their wellbeing soon as they give two shits about the American workers they have displaced.
It’s their economy, they can fix their own problems.
Do we still need a new phone every year or two like was necessary in the past? I've had no desire to upgrade my phone and don't see a compelling reason to in the future. If manufacturing had stayed in america there would be copious amounts of technical jobs in the (now decimated) regions, even if mechanization reduces the overall number of people.
The world has too many people to support as is, so it is beneficial if automation reduces the number of workers needed in the long run. But sending all of the factories out of the US benefits no one.
> he price for an iPhone could go from ~850$ to ~2000$[2]. Now imagine that this happens for every good that is produced largely in China and think again if bringing back a few ten thousand jobs is worth the total loss of consumer welfare in the states.
And it wouldn't matter one whit, because 90% of the expenses of the average American aren't going into buying consumer goods.
They go into buying transportation, medicine, education, food, and housing (With the price of housing rising to consume all of the middle class's economic surplus). None of those things are made in China.
Housing is the most fun one, because no matter how much people save, the price of houses rises to eat all of those savings. The only reason for why a house can cost a million dollars, is that people have saved that amount of money up. If that money weren't there, housing prices would be lower.
The destruction of much of the working class industrial base also provides the opportunity to shift them into a right wing alliance with the ruling class through scapegoating. And because of both their location (the industrial Midwest) and undemocratic structures like the electoral college, allows the ruling class to maintain a tight grip on executive branch power.
>Now, if you ask any pol running for the nomination who the greatest threat to America is... it’s not going to be China...
Well, that's not exactly true. There is at least one person who ran his campaign saying exactly that- China was America's greatest threat... He's "the guy nobody likes"... he is the current President!
I don't disagree with anything you are saying regarding the culpability of American politicians, but this common narrative overlooks the role of unadulterated greed on the part of American corporations. BigCo saw a billion person market. They saw cheap labor and a Wild West of regulations, especially environmental. Nevermind that they had to form joint ventures and expose their IP, it would be worth it. I saw an article earlier this year - think it was in the NYT - making the statement that now the US understood that the Chinese never had any intention of letting US companies gain a foothold in their domestic market - well duh! It was clear as day twenty+ years ago to anybody paying attention. It wasn't the Chinese that did this to the American worker and consumer, it was our own corporations with the full support of politicians.
The current buffoon political administration has identified a surface problem, but not the causes and certainly not a solution. The only solution I see comes in two parts:
1) The world needs to make China persona non grata.
2) Shareholders and corporate boards need to hold corporations accountable, not just on a moral basis, but also in terms of good business. Foreign companies cannot win there because the playing field isn't fair.
Thus, while yes we need politicians who can defend American interests, we also need to hold their corporate masters accountable.
I think with every president there r good things and bad things they do. Would like to just say that in the good category of our current president is their stance on China. Finally someone standing up and saying no more. I have not decided who to vote for in the next election but this issue will be one of the main ones I will be looking at.
> It’s economically productive for the 1% to maintain a trade relationship with China.
This leading argument is not specific to China at all and would equally apply to India and most poor countries. Severing trade with all those countries would severely hurt their economies and their citizens.
It's the same logic behind "dey terk er jerbs" but somehow made reasonable by throwing accusations of fascism.
This is disastrous. It's insane that the US is losing South Korea to China, considering we sacrificed tens of thousands of soldiers and considered starting nuclear war to prevent it in the 1950s. And people just shrug, because to the extent people care about politics right now, it's to focus on impeachment hearings, which themselves are happening because Trump blackmailed an important ally.
The core foreign policy of whoever is President should be recognizing China as our most formidable strategic competitor and working to maintain and build upon a system of alliances to limit its power and reach. Instead Trump is just a thug trying to shake down our allies for cheap wins and PR releases based on an idiotic understanding of American foreign policy interests.
Allegedly blackmailed, which nobody who was actually involved corroborates, to investigate exactly how it is that Joe Biden's son managed to get a very high-paying make-work job on the board of a Ukrainian oil company, and Joe Biden bragged on videotape about how he did infact blackmail the Ukrainian Government to fire the prosecutor who was investigating that.
What we're discovering is not that Trump is that out there. It's that the entire US Government and political elite has been that out there for many years now, and the entire mainstream media conspired to ignore it and cover it up. As they are continuing to do now.
It’s telling that when the establishment agrees with you executive orders and privileges are just that. If they disagree then it’s “it’s your privilege but you’re abusing it”.
What seems to be happening is people are losing some of their dirty money connections (like these post term engagements and talk circuits and appointments where you have no expertise, etc and these people are furious and upset. So they are willing to engage in destabilization or at the minimum distractive tactics (collusion didn’t work, let’s try this for that, no, let’s try bribery, if that doesn’t work it’ll be something else).
Not to say the current president is a Saint, but it would appear he’s ruffled some important feathers, otherwise they just wait him out.
> Now, if you ask any pol running for the nomination who the greatest threat to America is... it’s not going to be China...
Well, they asked a similar question during one of the democratic party debates [1] and some candidates said Trump but others pointed out climate change, Russia meddling in elections, China, etc. But the question was greatest "geopolitical threat" so I guess it's not exactly the same.
The conversation about China has shifted from being relatively peaceful during the Obama years to war like today.
The author of this article doesn’t understand how the presidential bully pulpit slowly changes the national conversation to war.
Not to say that China isn’t violating human rights. They are. But we, the Americans, are the ones who started this fight by goading them on.
Also: the crux of the argument in this article is “trade is bad for the little guy because our jobs are gone” which is one of the memes our political establishment is using to get us interested in war.
Dear author, can you go deeper into why trade is bad for anyone other than the 1%? Something beyond a ramble and some half baked repetitions of what we hear every day?
> we, the Americans, are the ones who started this fight by goading them on
That depends on how you measure it. There's a good case to be made for the thesis that we've been in a trade war ever since opening trade with China, but it's only recently that we've actually started counter-attacking.
Also, while it's gained traction recently, the political scientists I know personally have been decrying China's human rights violations for the past 20 years. Some of them were hoping things would improve as trade continued and the Chinese economy forced liberalization on the political sphere. That doesn't seem to be the way things have played out.
> The conversation about China has shifted from being relatively peaceful during the Obama years to war like today.
Just because the fight is now verbalized and on the forefront of the public's mind doesn't mean it wasn't already occurring, just not acknowledged. And I don't see the threat of war as being a serious one, given the nuclear deterrents of both sides.
Absolutely agree. Also, as a European, I can tell you that this perceived escalation is not an American phenomenon based on Donald's rhethoric. It's based in increasing perception of Chinese misdeeds in the West and around the world. And it's real in actual escalation of what China is doing.
In 2015, during the umbrella movement, there was discontent in Hong Kong over the taken-away promise of near-future free elections in 2017. In 2019 Hongkongers have their rights taken away NOW and are affected NOW. In 2019 we have a fairly accurate picture of what's going on in Xinjiang. The list could go on...
> Not to say that China isn’t violating human rights. They are. But we, the Americans, are the ones who started this fight by goading them on.
Americans goaded them on to human rights abuses? I strongly suspect that many Uighurs would be in concentration camps even in America had done everything that Beijing wanted.
Some Chinese sources have cited the War on Terror as a template for their anti-muslim measures. Of course that could be a convenient post-hoc rationalisation.
Did America steal Chinese intellectual property and build entire industries based on copying Chinese products?
A trade war doesn't just mean tariffs, it can happen in various forms. American companies did not have a fair game from the getgo competing with chinese companies, it's just that no one cared until now.
I would disagree with your 'crux' of the argument, as the majority of the article is discussing human rights violations, capitulation of some of America's largest institutions to CCP demands, and recent protests in Hong Kong.
I would also disagree with calling a fairly well cited call to action as 'half baked repetitions of what we hear every day'.
Could you go deeper into how we, the Americans, 'goaded China on' to commit human rights atrocities.
China goaded itself on. It's really a "boiling a frog" situation if you look at it historically. China's abuses of human rights, intellectual property, dissident repression, history whitewashing, etc. have slowly ramped up over the course of decades. Then Xi came to power, declared himself de facto dictator for life, turned the Nationalism dial to 11, and refused to take US demands for trade fairness seriously.
Yes, the current presidency is partly to blame, but don't pretend that it's the only, or even primary cause of the current narrative.
There are a lot of jobs dependent on trade with China (our company was affected by the Huawei ban, for example), and the fantasy that you can just cut-over to US manufacturing without huge transition job losses is unrealistic.
And if the US wants to get serious about the use of trade sanctions against human rights violations, there are a lot of places closer to home that it could look at. Not to mention the laws against boycotting a certain country for its human rights violations.
There's also the fantasy of assuming that China's next move after the trade sanctions would be a de-escalation. There's a lot of escalation opportunities for them. Like Taiwan.
(Let's be clear, this is not an apology for the human rights violations by China, which are very real especially in Xinjiang; what I am asking for is the same to be applied consistently and not driven by straightforward nationalism)
>> There are a lot of jobs dependent on trade with China (our company was affected by the Huawei ban, for example), and the fantasy that you can just cut-over to US manufacturing without huge transition job losses is unrealistic.
Completely agree. I very much empathize with the author and this issue is the only one where I feel some sort of connection with the current POTUS, but the engineering-at-scale capacities in the United States pale in comparison to China for a variety of reasons - some due to a cheaper labor force and more "flexible" labor laws, and some simply due to culture.
We do not have this capacity now and it is dubious that we can build it quickly without serious governmental subsidies and efforts not seen since World War 2. I'm personally good with the change, but it will cost billions if not trillions of dollars in lost productivity and marginal costs over the next decade or two, and this is not something to handwave away.
There are a hundred million+ factory workers in China producing products at massive scale for the world. Scaling up enough equipment, robots, and skilled workers in America to do even a fraction of that work is going to be a huge undertaking.
and people don't realise that china becomes manufacturing powerhouse not because of low costs. there're are many places in southeast asian alone which are much more cheaper in every aspect. What china has and other places dont have is, highly efficient logistics, very pragmatic kpi driven and arguably more efficient and definitely more business friendly local government policy makers and administration, end to end supply chain for almost every industry, well educated, very disciplined and hardworking workforce, and a unique culture that promotes perseverance, resilience, discipline and self improvement
i applaud your willingness to publish this content under your real name, and also understand your real name is closely associated with your software service.
i understand that gives you a certain amount of power that other employees, say of Apple, may not have. kudos to you for using it fruitfully - sincerely.
i am sure this will come across as tin foily, but i would advise you to monitor your digital assets and maybe even personal ones for probing/attack/etc. you're publishing an anti-CCP piece on a widely trafficked web property and are easily identifiable. you are making an enemy of a powerful adversary.
Author here. Thank you for your earnest concern. I'm a pretty risk-averse person and I take lots of pains to address those contingencies for all of my digital services.
I agree with you and imagine many others do as well. I think you are right it's about time I draw a line in my own personal life as well. No more Chinese manufactured goods for me. In fact, I think I will go ahead and get rid of what I currently own.
People suggest this a lot, but I don't think it does the trick. Some merchant bought a bunch of inventory from a Chinese factory, then tried to sell it to you, and you didn't buy it. When they get tired of holding onto it, they'll sell it at deep discount and eat the loss, then try to make up the loss on another product (and politically indifferent consumers will happily swoop in for a good deal). Meanwhile, China is laughing all the way to the bank.
If you really care, reach out directly to the merchants you buy from. Tell them you used to be a loyal customer, but you won't buy from them again until they stop carrying products made in China. Get your friends and coworkers to do the same, and keep the pressure on. If they go for it, follow through by rewarding them with your loyalty, and broadcast that win as publicly as possible. Talk about it, hashtag it, whatever. Organize.
Changing individual consumption habits rarely amounts to much more than virtue signalling.
And don't toss your existing stuff. You already paid for it, so it's not helping China anymore, and throwing it away doesn't hurt them. If anything, selling it to someone else reduces demand for new products (by exactly 1 unit).
Perhaps getting rid of what I currently own won't hurt China but it will help me maintain my resolve. Much like a former smoker tossing his old cigarettes in the fire.
It is about the principles and the message it conveys.
Gandhi protested against the British by spinning his own fabric, making his own shoes, and being completely independent. It made no difference to the British companies, but it sent a powerful message to the nation that Indians can be independent.
Do not underestimate or discourage people from doing what they principally object, even if practically it makes no sense or has no objective benefit.
I would say many mainlanders are reluctant say anything in this topic so you don't know.
BTW, I'm Canadian but was from mainland. There are also a lot of debate inside WeChat groups which include oversea Chinese who have access to all information.
Hi author, wondering what you think China should do with the organs of executed prisoners? It’s easy to find fault with them for (presumably) not asking for permission but it seems it would be a pity for them not to be used to help patients in need, no? This is separate from the question of what supposed crimes led to the execution. Short waiting lists can be explained by the lack of permission not only for executions but for all deaths of healthy people... not to defend China on other points, but this one seems like a odd concern possibly just zeroed in on for dramatic emotional effect, rather than for any actual practical reason.
For the other part, I have trouble understanding why a dead person would care about anything after their death ...although I can understand them having wishes before death, but any such wishes should be weighed in context for their reasonableness given all factors.
It's not just about the rights of the person being executed, but also those of their loved ones.
You may say you wouldn't care if your dead carcass was, say, grotesquely abused for someone else's amusement—after all, you're dead and no longer around to have any feelings about it—but how would your children feel? How would you feel if that was the fate awaiting your life partner?
The shared endeavor of human society entitles people to dignity even in death. That includes the right to bodily integrity.
Yeah that would be disrespectful. Kind of moving the goalposts though to use that example when talking about organ transplant, something that helps people who might otherwise die. Obviously I am not saying execution is worth it for that. Just more that if someone is dead already for whatever reason, it's hard to see it as a bad thing to help the living, if that can be done.
I mean if we're going to fashion extreme examples for dramatic effect, that can be done on the other side too. Imagine if the relatives have racist objections to donating an organ, and let someone die because their own feelings would be hurt if they saw a person of the "wrong" race being helped. How do you weigh their racist feelings, versus the life being saved? It's not that clear to me that their feelings should be at the forefront when other factors are considered.
I agree that dignity in death is a good thing. Just not so certain as you that there is only one way to get there. And none of this is to claim that China does what they do with dignity... I highly doubt that. But organ transplants are not such a terrible thing.
True, but you can find a religious belief from some random major or minor religion to justify or prohibit just about anything.
Including things that harm others or infringe on their rights.
So if that is guiding policy, policy is going to be a mess at worst or severely hobbled at best.
China doesn’t generally hold religion in high regard when formulating policy. They are more guided by practicality and expediency.
That puts them in conflict with many western values but it’s interesting to look at it from their perspective.
For those people who believe that organ donation is a grotesque abuse, that is bad but it should be weighed against other bad things. People dying is also bad. Which is worse? Grotesque abuse of a corpse, or letting someone die? China appears to have made a decision on this question.
> I have trouble understanding why a dead person would care about anything after their death
Examining the unstated implications of your argument, taken on its face, is not the same as moving the goalposts. Saying "I don't care what happens after I die, so no need to even ask if you can take my organs... except hang on, no, don't abuse my body in weird ways, I'm not okay with that"–THAT'S moving the goalposts.
> it's hard to see it as a bad thing to help the living
except to the extent that 1) harvesting organs from political prisoners is just about as close to a bad thing as you can imagine, and 2) even if we're not talking about China in particular, involuntary organ extraction harms the dignity of living kin.
> Imagine if the relatives have racist objections to donating an organ, and let someone die because their own feelings would be hurt if they saw a person of the "wrong" race being helped. How do you weigh their racist feelings, versus the life being saved?
The right to bodily integrity, to the choice about how your body is used, is unaffected by your motives. A right does not cease to become a right once you disagree with how someone wishes to exercise it.
You don't want your organs to go to a black man? Exercise your right to bodily integrity by not agreeing to be an organ donor.
There's substantial evidence that China has timed executions for the benefit of organ recipients: they're executing people to do organ transplants, not because they did something wrong.
Step 0: Don't execute people for non-violent crimes.
That's a part of the problem here. People speak their mind, disappear into a black bag and end up donating their organs to a Party member's daughter five months later.
The other major part being that there's very little due process, or fair justice, not in the way that you or I would expect it. Certainly not with lives on the line.
Worrying about wasted organs misses the point by an absurd distance.
The very worst case, he'll be denied access to China (and possibly HongKong) but otherwise he's fine. China is more interested in Chinese living in China and not some western somewhere.
China has very publicly ran DDOS attacks against GitHub when GitHub did some things they didn't like. Specifically they used infrastructure co-located with the GFW to run a MITM on connections to Baidu and serve malicious javascript. The malicious javascript used users computers to DDOS GitHub.
It's generally always worth keeping an eye on that, but AFAIK, the CCP doesn't normally target western nationals who talk trash or take modestly effective actions. They tend to focus on their own citizens, who they can do pretty much anything to without consequences, and on spying on anybody who might have information of significant use to them.
The problem is that doing what the author proposes and severing trade relations entirely would be extremely harmful to the 99% of Americans in the short term. Prices for virtually everything would skyrocket far faster than wages. And they would do so for everyone, not just blue collar workers. In the long term things might be better, but it would be a lot more painful to get there than I think most Americans are prepared to stomach.
Personally, my thoughts are in line with the author’s, but realistically we need to be looking at unified trade sanctions on key goods and potentially clamping down on foreign investment in both directions.
The tariffs are working; companies are thinking about China as a problem and how to minimize their reliance on China in case of disaster. Supply chains are moving out of China and into Taiwan and Vietnam and the Philippines. This is happening slowly but also smoothly. Let's keep raising the tariffs and let companies know the planned tariffs schedule for several years in advance. When companies understand that they need to get out of China or lose their competitive edge, only then will we start to see a mass exodus from Chinese manufacturing.
The cost of housing is a complicated matter but is mostly not due to jobs going elsewhere. Single family zoning and 'never change' rules in home owners associations and cities are some of the biggest drivers of housing prices.
Well I'm somewhere in that 99% of Americans, and I can tell you that "what keeps prices low for me" is very far from the top of my list of priorities. People have values and principles, that are important to us.
Honestly, I’m pretty sure if you asked some random person if they would be willing to not be able to afford anything for cutting the ties with everything made in china, they would refuse.
At the same time, I look at the ultra-cheap "deals" lists on Amazon and cringe at the amount of crap we compulsively order, all these "deals" for things we don't need that bring us little happiness beyond the brief ejaculatory pleasure of clicking "Checkout".
This post talks a lot about the Nazi party and its parallels to the CCP, but it really only talks about a couple things so I figure I'd write a list of how I think about it to see where other people think differently:
Nazis - tight control over information, propaganda, and news
CCP - even tighter control over information through technology
Nazis - serious degradation in rule of law across the nation
CCP - lacks legal arbitration (ie. 99% conviction rate)
Nazis - had an army solely devoted to the party and not the German people
CCP - the PLA is beholden to the CCP and none else
Nazis - outlawed all parties except the Nazi party
CCP - no other parties exist in China
Nazis - did not prioritize the individual, prioritized the 1000 year reich
CCP - has no care for individuals, but is focused on the CCP's long term vision at any cost
Nazis - at first territorial ambitions to land it believed was their right
CCP - territorial ambitions in Hong Kong and Taiwan
Nazis - worked hard to build its military to compete & dominate globally
CCP - boosted spending on military 20% last year
Nazis - significant belief of exceptionalism with strong nationalist undertones
CCP - a lot of nationalism coming from the top & propaganda arms ie global times
Nazis - secret police ie Gestapo
CCP - similar tactics to secret police ie interrogating or detaining reporters, insurgents, and stories of people disappearing
Nazis - fought against religiosity of its people
CCP - ethnically cleansed certain minority groups while closing monitoring others
Differing
Nazis - serious degree of racism
CCP - small degree of racism (ie Han vs minorities)
Nazis - severe punishment and brutally violent tactics ie death camps
CCP - less severe in terms of execution and punishment ie concentration camps
Idk these are just some thoughts off the top of my head. Is this uncalled for invective? I know everything is now compared to Nazis these days, but perhaps it's like the boy who cried wolf and now there's a reason to. Btw I am not trying to compare severity, just some similarities. I realize it's nearly impossible to do something worse than the holocaust, and in many ways I doubt the CCP ever would. Also add to the list if you think of anything to change or add.
If I might post an unpopular opinion, and let me assure you I'm not secretly a pro-CCP shill: what's happening HK has much more to do with changing economic realities than it does with an evil agenda from the Chinese government.
In 1997 HK had 1/3 of the GDP of mainland China and was the only way for Western companies to interact with China. Today HK has 3% of the GDP of mainland China and a huge part of this is because China has opened its borders to foreign investment. Shenzhen has a thriving economy because if you're a western company and want to do business with China, you can just go there and do business. In the past you would have had to go through Hong Kong to make this happen.
The Hong Kong riots were sparked because China wanted to extradite someone who murdered his girlfriend in Taiwan and then went to hide in HK to avoid extradition. If the same thing happened in the united states we would be equally furious. Of course I'm not stupid, I know that this extradition is part of a growing feeling of increasingly powerful influence of China on HK, and I know this because this how independent nations feel when the US similarly puts extradition pressure on other countries. Look what happened with Julian Assange!
But the protests in Hong Kong aren't just about some emergent "evil" coming from China. Their part of the economic and social anxiety that comes from having your economic power completely change in the span of 20 years. In America we know power and independence go hand in hand.
I'm equally as wary of growing Chinese political power as I am of US Hegemony. But the current strife in Hong Kong is perfect propaganda fuel for both the US and China. Both nations essentially get to stoke the flames of nationalism while HK suffers. I strong encourage people to at least question the prevailing narratives from both sides and start to look at the economic realities of what's happening.
You're missing the point, which is that the people of HK are obviously capable of a higher level of self-government, and the CCP could have chosen to allow that under the "one country, two systems" framework. All of the other members of its "Asian Tiger" cohort (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore) have that.
The CCP was not legally obligated to do so, of course; Drew IS wrong about the illegality of the CCP's behavior here. And as a practical matter, trying to deprive China of the territory of Hong Kong is a fool's errand.
But the talented people of HK who stayed in 1997 in the hopes that the rest of China would meet them closer to halfway do not need to remain. And, now that close to a billion Chinese have been lifted out of grinding poverty by the economic policies of the last 40 years, any economic moral obligation the West had towards the Chinese people has been met; there's no particular reason for the West to further subsidize Chinese development over further development of India, Indonesia, etc.
that's rich. The Hong Kong people had their freedom and autonomy. And what have they done with it? squandered it. They've been subjects of an empire. They are not equipped to rule themselves. They don't seek self-determination and autonomy and responsibility for creating their future they seek to blame the government or China or the police. and now they are seeking to destroy not to create. And yet they should possess greater freedom?
Hong Kong is still extremely important to the CCP. Tariffs can be reduced by first moving exports through Hong Kong because of a first sale rule[0]. The recent bill passed in the US congress puts some of these rules under scrutiny[1].
Macau is all in on a single industry which works when the economy is going well, but not so well when it tanks. Furthermore, the concentration of wealth in Macau is even more skewed towards the top. The average Macanese is poorer than the average Hong Konger which is why so many now live in HK.
Do you have any poll/survey results to support your claim that Hong Kongers keep on protesting because they feel economically less important to China? How can you attribute the protests to purely economic reasons and ignore this even more important political factor?
Second, Hong Kong is still extremely important economically to China:
> Hong Kong riots where sparked because China wanted to extradite someone who murdered his girlfriend in Taiwan and then went to hide in HK to avoid extradition.
Liberal societies, such as the Bay Area (where I live), it’s impossible to criticize anyone without having the doubt of “offending” someone. When it comes to China, I can’t go out in the lunch room and openly criticize CCP because you know, I could “offend” a Chinese National.
This needs to stop. I see this behavior on HN, which is frustrating, counterproductive, anti-free speech and extremely left-winged.
Another problem is to try being a moderate in these liberal pockets of America. The moment you pick out a couple of things that I agree about what Trump is doing, I get intense opposition, lose friendships, get judged, etc.
The Bay Area, the Silicon Valley, the 3 trillion dollar neighbor of America is a suffocating place for anyone who has dissenting opinion about some liberal concepts.
Silicon Valley people think that moderates and right-wing folks hate gays, lgbt community and loves guns, hates China which is far from the truth. Then they feel to justify themselves by overcompensating, supporting China and smearing the truth. Ironically, they make fun of right-wing echo chambers.
If your political ideology looks away from objective truth, you need to question it. No matter how “conservative” or “liberal”.
Because he's criticizing liberals and most people on HN are liberals. Most censorship ("hate speech" included) is code for shutting your political opponents up. HN makes this really easy by making comments hard to read by removing contrast with the background as they get voted down; post something too much against the grain and it'll get flagged and hidden by default. When you hand users the power to shut those with whom they disagree up, it will inevitably be abused.
I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.
I think the whole voting thing is stupid. It obviously leads to censorship. Someone else's opinion should not count less than others even if you don't agree with them. Assuming we're not talking about plain spam (bots, ads, etc). Graham did not think this through properly. Everyday I come across comments that are downvoted or flagged and can see no reason why that was done apart from subjective ones.
Of course, there's a lot of subjectivity. But if you think you can make a site like HN be interesting without voting, you should give it a try. It would be an order of magnitude easier and cheaper to operate, and that would be a real innovation.
Some mentally challenged people actually downvoted you it seems. I have thought about alternatives for a few months now actually. And I admit it's not easy.
Problem is, it doesn't just attach a "score" to a comment. The UI will gradually hide comments as they are voted farther down; I've seen many that are barely legible. Flagging also hides comments by default. I can't tell you how many reasonable, well-thought out points I've seen that I have to highlight with the mouse to actually read. I wouldn't even see many insightful comments had I not logged in and enabled "showdead".
There is a great deal of difference between giving users the tools to express disagreement and giving them the tools to block out the opinions of those with which I disagree.
Finally, quoting Paul Graham isn't really an argument. Fine, it's his site, but I'm allowed to say I disagree with how the voting on his site is implemented.
Sure, but I think our points are missing each other. Mine is that claims of HN's ideological bias are notoriously in the eye of the beholder. Once people run into a few things they dislike—which is inevitable—they imprint on the idea that the community is biased against them. There's nothing objective about it, and all sides do it. I wouldn't say all users do it, but I suspect the more ideologically committed you are, the more you are likely to. That is, it depends on the magnitude of one's ideological vector, but not the direction. I wrote about this yesterday if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21577584
I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
Hi, thanks for the words, I just wanted to get it out, upvotes or downvotes don't bother me.
I also understand that this may not apply to other people's experience in the Silicon Valley, thererfore I said that your mileage may vary.
The bigger question is - Why should we allow Chinese nationals in America (even more so in Australia) to supress free speech and promote CCP ideals? Its one thing to do it inside China, a whole another level to spread it across the world as immigrants.
The secret about contrarian viewpoints is that they tend to be less supported by obvious evidence, which means there's a confounding factor of being downvoted for expressing a poorly-reasoned viewpoint.
For extreme examples: "I don't vaccinate my kids because I don't want them to have autism" is both contrarian and sort of actively disproved by evidence, so downvoting on the latter grounds is entirely reasonable. If you want to run a worthwhile discussion site, the discussions have to be meaningful to discuss. "The open-source movement is a mistake and the world would be better served by changing the Open Source Definition" is a contrarian, unpopular opinion, but there isn't clear evidence either way as to its merit (among other things, it's more of a straight-up opinion than a report of facts), so it's worth discussing, and shouldn't be downvoted just for being contrarian.
The comment above mostly made testable claims about Silicon Valley's culture. "I feel like the SJWs have gone too far" is an opinion. "People cannot criticize the Chinese government in lunchrooms" is a claim that can be proven or disproven.
I lived in China for 5 years, most of the time in Xinjiang, and is sad how the media manipulates people in the west, you clearly have never been in XinJiang or in China at all. You can believe whatever you want and I'm sure most readers here will support you, because like you , they have been deceived. What is happening in Hong Kong is sad, I agree with you there, and something should be done by the US and their allies.But, Uighurs are one of the 56 ethnics groups of China, like Mongolians, Weiwer, ... not a nationality, and not the only Muslim ethnic group, there is no concentration camps or anything like that. Sorry. There are Uighurs terrorists in prison after the bomb car exploded in TianAnMen and the incident in Kunming's train station in 2013, that you probably dont know about, in the same way the US have Iraqis and afghans in Guantanamo... just because..... Good luck with your campaign, I'm sure people with join you and think you are the coolest guy in HN today. But I had to break it up to you... sorry
It is whataboutism, but the U.S. is guilty of a lot of similar things that China is, not as bad in most cases, but I think it's fair to compare the Uyghurs to Guantanamo, the way we're treating immigrants at the border, or how discriminatory our justice system is towards black people.
We have a higher percentage of people in jail then China by a lot (5x). Many of them are in jail for political/racial reasons (the Drug War, Immigration).
We have the NSA spying on all of us. As well as Google, FB, etc.
We treat our protestors horribly as well, look at what the FBI did to black rights protesters or look at how the Dakota Access pipeline protesters were treated.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with Drew on this article, and I'd support a boycott, but in the words of someone I'm not a fan of: "Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world."
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." [1]
Crack cocaine carried a much harsher sentence then Cocaine, a law that very clearly targeted black people. [2]
Marijuana use is the same between white and black people, but black people are 3.73x more likely to be arrested for it.[3]
[1] Plenty of countries with homogenous populations have harsh drug laws, so it hardly seems like that was the only consideration, if at all. After all, Prohibition in the US happened a long time before 1968, and alcohol is arguably less destructive than heroin, and nobody was targeting hippies or black people with a ban on alcohol.
[3] Black people getting arrested at a higher rate doesn't make the policies racist. It either makes the cops racist (possible) or it means that there are other factors beyond skin color that are affecting the stats (most likely explanation).
Take a moment and read about China's human rights violations:
* Hundreds of human rights lawyers (not even dissidents, just the LAWYERS who defended people) were snatched by gestapo all over China in what is known as the 709 Crackdown [1].
* One of those lawyers, Wang Quanzhang was sentenced to 4.5 years [2] for "subversion of state power". But that's not enough. China actually went after Wang's 6-year-old son [3], forcing him out of his school and banning any other school from taking him in.
* A dissident, Wang Bingzhang [4] was kidnapped by Chinese agents in Vietnam and sentenced to life in prison after a closed trial that lasted 1 day.
* A man wore a t-shirt with the word "Xitler" on it and was disappeared [5]. Eventually he was tried for "subversion of state power" while barred from meeting with lawyers [6]
* Another man, Wang Meiyu [7] hold up a placard calling for Xi’s resignation & democracy. He was arrested for "picking quarrels”. He ended up dead in custody.
* A woman live streamed herself splashing ink on a Xi poster [8]. She was disappeared [9]. Her last social media update: "Right now there are a group of people wearing uniforms outside my door. I’ll go out after I change my clothes. I did not commit a crime. The people and groups that hurt me are the ones who are guilty". Later on there was report of her being sent to a psychiatric hospital [10]
* After the ink-splash woman's disappearance her father made a series of broadcast to call attention to her plight. He ended up getting taken away by the police in the middle of a live stream [11]
* 5 people associated with a Hong Kong bookstore that sold titles such as "Xi Jinping and His Six Women" were disappeared [12]. Only one managed to escape back to HK. He held a press briefing to tell the world about his kidnapping by China. He's now in exile in Taiwan. The other 4 are still somewhere in China.
And, of course:
* 1.5 million [13] Uyghurs rounded up in concentration camps
* Genocide through forced abortions [14] on Uyghur women
* Sexual torture [15] of Uyghur women such as rape & rubbing intimate parts with chili paste.
* Leaked footage [16] of a large number of blindfolded Uyghurs shackled together
* A Canadian journalist wanted to debunk reports of Chinese anti-Muslim repression so he went on a stage-managed show tour put on by China [17]. That means he only saw a fake Potemkin village that China actually thought was acceptable by Western standard. But the brutality of even this fake Potemkin village stunned him. Now imagine what's really happening in the real concentration camps where millions of Uyghurs are being held. Imagine how bad the true situation is.
* Using minorities & political prisoners as free organ farms [18]. A doctor's eye witness account [19]: 'The prisoner was brought in, tied hand and foot, but very much alive. The army doctor in charge sliced him open from chest to belly button and exposed his two kidneys. Then the doctor ordered Zheng to remove the man’s eyeballs. Hearing that, the dying prisoner gave him a look of sheer terror, and Zheng froze. “I can’t do it,” he told the doctor, who then quickly scooped out the man’s eyeballs himself.'
* Call for retraction of 400 Chinese scientific papers [20] amid fears organs came from Chinese prisoners
* 15 Chinese studies [21] retracted due to fears they used Chinese prisoners' organs
* Cultural genocide (and organ harvests, of course) [22]. A uyghur's testimony: "First, children were stopped from learning about the Quran, then from going to mosques. It was followed by bans on ramadan, growing beards, giving Islamic names to your baby, etc. Then our language was attacked – we didn’t get jobs if we didn’t know Mandarin. Our passports were collected, we were told to spy on each other, innocent Uyghur prisoners were killed for organ harvesting"
* China is moving beyond Uyghur and cracking down on its model ...
Hey Drew, just wanted to say I couldn’t agree more. I do not know about the US’s domestic manufacturing capabilities, and I don’t think I care, either; this situation is not OK. It probably wasn’t OK for a very long time. Something needs to change. It probably won’t come at a small cost.
I’m sure this thread will have a lot of whataboutism. Remember what your parents always told you: two wrongs don’t make a right.
It really surprised me that Google staff went apeshit over Dragonfly, and GitHubbers over the ICE contract, yet Apple rank and file seem relatively content with a special backdoored iCloud service that is used in China, no doubt used daily to target people for human rights abuses via surveillance.
Same thing could be said for Microsoft, where employees were upset they were providing O365 and Azure to ICE, but there is no similar outrage directed towards the special China cloud they run
What can I, as an average Joe living in the US, do to help?
Edit: After reading responses, I realize that there is a better question to ask: What people in the US in general do to help (vote a certain way, write to certain politicians, change purchasing habits), and how can I specifically participate in that?
You work at a multibillion-dollar company, yet live in a state with an (comparatively) uneducated population. That's far from average.
One idea would be to run workshops for children/or families teaching them how to repair their devices, and which devices to get if they want them to last (think upgradability, battery-replacement, similar). If we're wanting to lessen China's power over the working class, making people capable of maintaining electronics in the same way they can maintain cars will go a long way. Bonus points if you teach them how to reinstall operating systems without bricking their systems.
Another idea would be to use your programming ability to create software to help people: think getting past censorship, keeping communications secure, similar. China and Hong Kong both are more or less tech wonderlands, solving the UX issues that stop anyone from throwing a single-board computer (think Orange/Raspberry Pi) online and using it to communicate over the open web and store data without fear of it being compromised in some way by doing nothing more than flashing an OS image and booting would mean that almost everyone would gain, but especially people in those countries.
> Hong Kong is the place where humanity makes its stand against oppressors.
Really? I didn’t know protesters targeted the local tycoons who made their lives unbearable in the past 20 years. Not to mention the humanity of laundering money for the worst thugs in the world. Perspective.
You may have heard reports of vandalism. I'm pretty sure the tycoons weren't too happy about their property getting damaged. They'd probably also like to keep the seats in Election Committee that they'd lose if universal suffrage were instated, but that the CCP has guaranteed them so far. https://www.elections.gov.hk/ecss2016/eng/figures.html
If you think the protesters support tycoons because they oppose the CCP, you ought to reconsider whether those are really opposites.
Xi's in a trap. The nationalist fervor that the CCP has whipped up for decades, coupled with the demonization of the HK protestors by Chinese media and Xi's 'no compromise' stance, makes it impossible for him to lighten up -- and the protests to de-escalate -- without him seeming weak. The HK protestors/population at this point are so angry and the radical wing so large, that they won't willingly de-escalate. Even if Lam leaves the demonstrations will continue. This sets up the stage for atrocities and more international condemnation.
Already on the international front, China is in trouble. The pro-China KMT party in Taiwan may suffer greatly in the next election because of what's going on in HK now (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3037040/tai...), making China's aggressive demands for forced unification even more unlikely in the medium term. This week, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a HK rights bill (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-usa/us-...) that, if it becomes law, will put China through an annual review, which will further erode the Sino-U.S. relationship for years to come. There have been calls for a boycott of the 2022 Olympics in Beijing which seems fringey now, but won't be if China sends in the troops.
There's also the internal question. Ordinary people in China are getting censored news, but some of the raw information about what's going on is getting through via social media. What does this mean for sentiment in Cantonese speaking areas of southern China, or for areas of China where provincial officials are resented for unjust or unfair treatment of citizens?
The Nationalist trap is not isolated to China. Indeed Trump is flirting with the same issues, as is Kim Jong Un, as is Bolsanaro, as is Duterte, as is Erdogan. All over the world strongman nationalists are gaining power and simultaneously dooming us to the conflicts of the older generations. It's depressing as shit that so many countries are regressing right now when we should be more united than ever.
China may be the most flagrant (debatable) but they are far from the only instance, and the problems that are haunting Xi now will haunt all of these leaders eventually. Some already are feeling it.
I was waiting for the orange man bad post. Do you know who built the cages for children? Do you know who banned the exact same countries for travel that Trump did? Do you know who arrested 8 whistleblowers? Do you know who killed the first US citizen without hearing? Newsflash, it wasn't the orange man.
I didn't comment on his policies, I commented on the style of politician he is. Obama was no angel, far from it, but he also wasn't elected as a populist. Trump was.
Social media in China is also heavily censored and manipulated. There are quite a few in mainland China who understands what's going on here in Hong Kong, but most buy into the state propaganda and wants us exterminated for being "separatists" and "traitors of the Chinese race."
Most protesters don't want HK independence, they simply want universal suffrage which was guaranteed by the CCP in the 1997 joint declaration. But the CCP has failed their promise and almost half of the seats in the HK legislature are chosen by "functional constituencies" that do not represent the people. Of course the CCP has labeled these people as "separatists" to attract domestic hatred towards the protesters, and spreads propaganda in China that falsely represents their demands.
I am not sure you are telling the full story. It seems to me different sides have different interpretations w.r.t the 'universal suffrage' as in the joint declaration.
Western media is diverse because they are not all controlled by the same government. For example, the China Daily US Edition is based in the NYC and therefore can be considered "Western media", but being owned by the CCP it obviously publishes pro-PRC propaganda.
Obviously if you define "Western media" as newspapers providing a certain viewpoint then by definition your argument would be correct. But that isn't an interesting argument.
Moreover, using the Internet people in the US can read diverse points of view, including e.g. those of pro-China websites. This is not possible in China, except for a small minority who have access to VPN and similar technology.
What I've heard from PRC nationals in the US is that the CIA is behind the "riots". I'm assuming this is the narrative being pushed by the state-run media in the PRC.
Definitely, pretty much from day one the PRC has been accusing the CIA and MI6 for inciting the "riots" designed to hurt the feelings of Chinese people.
I received news from mainland China, Taiwan and US media. Most of the US news (even NYT) are indeed often biased toward China and of course same for Chinese media. The biases contribute greatly to the increasing animosity between the two worlds.
Several highly-educated Mainland China associates and colleagues have shared such thoughts with me and expressed general disdain for the HK protestors.
This interview was in Melbourne, Australia. Many of the interviewees were mainland students in Australia.
Not saying your associates and colleagues must be like one of them. Just offering one possible explanation.
You can also test their knowledge, by asking them about the Five Demands of Hong Kong protestors, and also Hong Kong legislative and government structures. Some of the answers can be found in the original article.
I met some while I was studying at a top 5 university in the U.S. One had come out of the fog after studying a decade in Singapore. He could look back clearly at the brainwashing and described how it is done, but it takes many years on the outside for even very intelligent people to realize what has been done.
Props to China though for having a pretty effective system.
> Xi's in a trap. The nationalist fervor that the CCP has whipped up for decades, coupled with the demonization of the HK protestors by Chinese media and Xi's 'no compromise' stance, makes it impossible for him to lighten up -- and the protests to de-escalate -- without him seeming weak.
Yeah I don't have any sympathy for him or for the CCP. Appealing to nationalist sentiment to amass political power is making a deal with the devil, and we know how that goes. Let's just hope the US doesn't need to learn this lesson as well.
The sad fact is that when these kinds of authoritarian regimes rise to power, it takes years of abhorrent violence to tear them down. The West naively thought the "free market" would liberalize China (and Russia) and we were very wrong. We're reaping the consequences of that policy mistake on a global scale.
It's the rule of law and human rights that are liberalizing (which careful readers will realize is a tautology). The West needs to stop legitimizing and funding regimes that don't respect these fundamental ideas, and here I'm thinking of China, but also other totalitarian regimes like Saudi Arabia. Furthermore we need to build alliances against these regimes across the world.
> The West naively thought the "free market" would liberalize China (and Russia) and we were very wrong.
We have all heard this idea thrown around now for some time. It’s only in the last few years it seems people have accepted that it wasn’t going to work.
In the context of the trade war and everything lately, I’ve really been thinking about this theory.
On one hand, we know the current reality. An ascendant authoritarian country looking to return to great power status. We have a trade war as a result of years of toxic codependency. It remains to be seen how far the trade war goes and wether or not it is the catalyst for some future war.
Now on the other hand, what direction would China have gone had Nixon not gone to China to open up trade negotiations in the 70s.
It’s impossible to know, but I can imagine quite a number of scenarios that are far worse than a trade war with China.
Imagine a North Korea type situation where the country is much larger and influential and does not have such a co dependent trading relationship with the United States.
Is that really a better outcome?
Also important noting that China already had nukes when they began joining international trade in the 70s.
Yeah, that's all fair and counterfactuals are impossible. My instinct, though I have nothing to back this up, is:
- The US foreign policy of regime change and bullying hegemony was a complete failure, and totally counterproductive.
- We should have deployed soft power, like aid, diplomacy, and the Peace Corps, to places that were vulnerable to falling into authoritarian rule long term, and invested in the development of poorer countries.
- We should have more seriously considered deploying hard power to places that initially fell into authoritarian rule. I know Cuba was a failure and I know military action has serious consequences (especially for civilians), but compared to authoritarian governments wielding vast nuclear arsenals and ponderous economic weight... it's a tough choice.
- We should internalize that as the US goes, the world tends to follow. Whenever we violate sovereignty, human rights, or our own values and laws, the world takes notice. Like it or not, we're responsible for showing the world how a liberal superpower behaves. We need to take that responsibility seriously.
> We should have more seriously considered deploying hard power to places that initially fell into authoritarian rule. I know Cuba was a failure and I know military action has serious consequences (especially for civilians), but compared to authoritarian governments wielding vast nuclear arsenals and ponderous economic weight... it's a tough choice.
I'm impressed how you blatantly assume that marching into some foreign country, guns blazing, will magically turn them into a liberal democracy.
I mean, your track record is abysmal. There are exceptions (eg Japan) but generally when the US puts boots on the ground somewhere, the place turns to shit.
Yeah I think trade and economic pressure is kind of the only other road; basically put authoritarianism in quarantine. I'm a little unsatisfied with that because it's hard to fully isolate anyone. We can't isolate China from Russia, for example, and it more or less just creates a club of authoritarian regimes. But like, realistically we couldn't have done anything about the Bolshevik revolution, or the rise of the CCP. Maybe we fucked up in the Korean War by stopping, but we failed in Cuba. It's a tough problem, and smarter, more experienced people than I have been trying to crack it for longer than I have.
It's also why foreign aid doesn't work. Corrupt politicians are effectively bribed to be incompetent. If they fix their country they lose the foreign aid.
But free market did liberalize regimes in both China and Russia, if you compare to the 1980s! It also fed their populations, that is, shortages of food are now hard to imagine.
The free market did not turn either country into an efficient democracy, that's true. It did not improve the tolerance to dissent to Western levels (sadly, not a particularly high mark recently). It did not prevent an authoritarian regime in either country, too.
Both the west and China omit information when reporting about HK. China highlights protester violence, the west talk about police. The only difference is that west is doing it voluntarily.
If you step back and think about it, if this protest were to happen in the US, with subways burned, shops destroyed, road blocked, for 6 months. What is going to happen? Compare this hypothetical scenario with what happened in Hong Kong.
Where’s the gap? In 2019 we’ve been accustomed to export thinking to other people and import outrage from the cheapest source. And it doesn’t take a dictatorial government to push a narrative.
> China highlights protester violence, the west talk about police. The only difference is that west is doing it voluntarily.
Both in the US and in China people work in media voluntarily. In neither case they have freedom to publish anything they want, they have to push specific narratives coming from the top. In China narratives come directly from the government, in the US indirectly through the system of "manufacturing consent".
China Daily has an office in NYC [1], and publishes a US edition of their newspaper. This is a newspaper directly owned by the CCP. And you can pick up a copy of the regular China Daily in many cities. Is the uncensored New York Times available in China? I think not. Trying to equate the two is ridiculous. No one is going to buy your argument that "manufacturing consent" means that the level of freedom of speech is the same in the US and China. It's just completely wrong.
When the police come in and arrest everyone working for the China Daily in NYC and send them to jail and physically torture them like the CCP did to Simon Cheng or harvest their organs like the CCP did to Falun Gong followers, then you can make your argument. And many people in the US will fight just as hard for the rights of China Daily US Edition as they fight for freedom of speech and universal suffrage in Hong Kong.
In the US I can read any English source, both ones from China and ones from US/UK media. I read that the CCP imprisoned approximately one million Uighurs in concentration camps in Xinjiang, where they are being held indefinitely without due process, and there are reports of physical torture (waterboarding and tiger chair), rape, and occasional killings. I also read from CCP's point of view that this started because there were some terrorist knife attacks in 2014. So I can get both sides' point of views. But after reading both sides, my conclusion is that even if 10,000 people are guilty it does not justify a Holocaust-scale genocide of one million Uighurs, where the overwhelming majority are innocent and did not participate or condone the terrorists. There is no difference between the logic of those perpetrating the genocide in Xinjiang and the logic of Hitler during WWII.
Let's consider a hypothetical scenario similar to the one you put forward then. Suppose the US government conducts mass imprisonment of a certain population in concentration camps, like CCP is doing to Uighurs in Xinjiang.
Well, it's not hypothetical, we already did it during WWII to Americans of Japanese ethnicity. And newspapers across the US spoke up against this atrocity [1]. Contrast that with China where the newspapers are forced to push the government's narrative, and invariably focus on the terrorism in 2014 that sparked the CCP's disproportional response rather than the barbaric violence perpetrated by the CCP.
The US government has formally apologized for the atrocities in the concentration camps where Japanese-Americans were held, and paid reparations ($42K per camp survivor in current USD). We vowed never to do something so horrible again. But in 2019 China is still playing with mass forced incarceration, and they even have the gall to call it a model for combating violence that other countries should follow. The CCP has replaced the Japanese empire in abusing their own population (but I think some in China are racist and view Uighurs as not part of the Chinese people, just like how Nazi Germany viewed the Jewish people, and how some in US during WW2 viewed Japanese-Americans).
> Suppose the US government conducts mass imprisonment of a certain population
I'd argue that's not hypothetical at all, even with Xinjiang the US has by far the highest rate of imprisonment on the planet both of adults and children.
Most are black. Vast majority are not violent crimes.
It's entirely out of step with the rest of the developed world.
Ah, yes. Because someone convicted of a crime going to jail is the same thing as someone being sent to a camp due to their religion. Equating the issues in the US justice system to concentration camps is ridiculous.
I've noticed a massive apathy amongst Chinese towards Xinjiang, the vast majority don't care and think they deserve it. Perhaps you have a lot more in common than you think.
Both countries have horrendous records and many from there feel not the slightest bit of shame about it.
I grew up in Jiangsu province of China. I heard some very nice stories about people in Xinjiang from my neighbours who had worked in Xinjiang for some time. I also heard some very bad stories about certain group of people from Xinjiang. It's hard to agree with you that 'a massive apathy amongst Chinese towards Xinjiang' --- as an ordinary Chinese, I want a peaceful country, and no terrorists, and I love diversity.
"some terrorist knife attacks in 2014" -- you mean the Turkestan Liberation Movement, which has been going on for 140 years, which has ties to ISIS, which organized on Facebook (one major reason FB is banned, they refused to take action against the terrorists). Something like 60-70 dead is "some".
There's no genocide going on. Nor is there any British nor US-style response to the Hong Kong terrorists.
Polling the folks in Xinjiang, they found that the culture was repressive, divisive and anti-China. Hence the reeducation due to crazy ideology.
Just like the crazy Falun Gong people, believing they were growing beings in their arms, legs and other parts of their bodies with "Energy Techniques". China's not big on extremists and crazies.
See, the majority of China are pretty innocent people, and can be swayed and sucked in by cults and religions. That's why the government steps on them "with no mercy".
There's a huge difference in between the Nazis and the Chinese. You just refuse to see it because you don't have the background and education for it. Talk to some people who were around in World War II along with those in Afghanistan and see what they have to say about Nazis and Islamic Extremists. Though they might censor it to be politik these days.
China is about Unity, with the head of the family being State. Division isn't welcome. Cults aren't welcome. Religious movements are welcome in designated areas. "House Churches", "Private Priests" and "Private Imams" aren't welcome. Just like homeschooling isn't allowed in Germany these days so the closet Nazis don't have as many places to hide and indoctrinate people. Get over yourself.
> If you step back and think about it, if this protest were to happen in the US, with subways burned, shops destroyed, road blocked, for 6 months. What is going to happen? Compare this hypothetical scenario with what happened in Hong Kong.
If the same protests happened in the US, with a quarter of the population marching peacefully on June 16 (as it did in Hong Kong), the government has to immediately respond to its people’s demands, for otherwise the current government will lose in landslide in the next election. And all the subway burning, shops destruction, etc will be avoided — these events happened at least three months into Hong Kong protests in September, long after the mega march on June 16.
Thank you for pointing out Hong Kong has no genuine democracy, which is directly related to one of the five key demands.
Uh, no they wouldn't. They'd kill them for what they are -- rioters and looters, assaulting people and terrorizing an entire city of 17 million people.
They wouldn't care about losing. It's about response. Our response to riots like this is to declare martial law and send in the law enforcement and troops.
"will be avoided"?? as if they didn't happen.
Hong Kong was never promised democracy nor independence in any agreement with China. It's been talked about, again and again.
If you think that this is what the HK riots have been all about, think again. Poverty, housing, criminality, Canton vs Mandarin, HK vs China -- the British faced this several times and their response was exactly what the US would be, with a large death toll. The government didn't change hands at that point, kiddo.
Check your repetitive narrative and self-delusion when you leave your safe space.
> If you step back and think about it, if this protest were to happen in the US, with subways burned, shops destroyed, road blocked, for 6 months. What is going to happen? Compare this hypothetical scenario with what happened in Hong Kong.
It's not hypocritical because the US has democratic avenues and Hong Kong (and China) doesn't, disruption is their only option.
When Hong Kong has universal free and fare elections I'll think about joining your condemnation.
The article ignores the impact on poor people in the US if trade with China was cut off. In general, poor people would pay more for everything that is currently imported from China. Everyone would pay more, but poor people would be impacted the most.
I'm not sure if that's enough to say trade with China is a good thing.
But it should turn your idea of a very simple answer into a much more complicated picture.
One nitpick: Hong Kong has its own legal definition of "rioting". It's from the Public Order Ordinance[1], and carries a maximum 10 years jail sentence. The entire law itself is quite draconian and was struck down in the final days of British rule, but was reinstated immediately after the handover.
When China took the book sellers they prosecuted them in China under Chinese laws. It stands to reason China could take and prosecute some "rioters" under Chinese law and Chinese implications.
Richard Nixon carries a lot of responsibility for the current situation. He never ever put the human rights issue on the table, he never pressed on the issue, because from the beginning his sole goal was having access to a cheap workforce, and damned the rest.
The Communist Party situation at that time rested on the abuse of power. Nixon just strengthened their position by given market access and capital without pressure on the human rights issues.
Actually, the cynic in me thinks that this was by design. By reinforcing the power of the communist party, american corporations wouldn't have to worry about the chinese workers fighting for better labor and environmental conditions, thus keeping costs low.
They do work together. There is benefit in controlling the growth and rise of the Chinese and american populace. I don't know how you guarantee working conditions for 1 billion people. Just the spread of resources alone gets thin very quickly. Buy giving them the space to rise by selling to the US with subsidized shipping and what else has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, abuses or not. That is a fundamental good assuming it is stable. I think the courageous view is to integrate the cynical view and go one step further.
> because from the beginning his sole goal was having access to a cheap workforce, and damned the rest.
Uh. His goals were to further American interests in Cold War geopolitics and increase his personal stature as a statesman. Friendly American relations with Chinese Communists put more pressure on Soviet Communists.
Free trade has nothing to due with it. You're forgetting that Nixon went to China in 1972, but the Chinese economy didn't start opening up until 1978 under Deng (and long after Nixon).
I applaud standing up to China's human rights violations.
But this post grossly underestimates the short term economic effects that cutting trade ties with China would have. Companies would go bankrupt. It is quite likely that the US and possibly the world would enter a recession or depression. These events will have devastating effects on people around the world far beyond the 1%.
We are part of a world economy. We are dependent on China and China is dependent on us.
Surely there are better ways to effect change in China than waging economic war. War of any kind will cause suffering.
In 10 or 15 years the the better way to effect change will be armed conflict in addition to economic recession. In another 30 years there will be no way to effect change. The time to act is now.
I don't necessarily disagree with the article, I just want to point out that outside of the US others will readily view this line of thought as hypocritical and self-serving.
As a US citizen, I try to consider how the rest of the world may view our actions (glass houses and all). Following the logic here it would make sense for the rest of the world to cutoff trade with the United States due to the Iraq war, which has caused many civilian deaths.
But if you agree that the rest of the world should have sanctioned the US for the Iraq war (among other things) then there might be a consistency with trying to sanction China.
The Iraq war is just one example out of the many atrocities that the US has committed around the world. (as we speak, the US is currently supporting coups in Latin America).
So even though the US has absolutely no moral high ground - I still think that it is important for individual Americans to take a stand against atrocities around the world. I don't think we can discredit Drew's post based on the fact that the US government is just as (or more) evil than the Chinese government.
I do think that special care needs to be taken to avoid the hypocrisy and call out US atrocities as they happen - but calling out the Chinese crimes is very important in the current global climate.
> outside of the US others will readily view this line of thought as hypocritical and self-serving
Sitting here in a former eastern block country I completely disagree. It is absolutely obvious that communism is by far humanity's greatest moral failure and China just proves it again.
United States would need need to start dropping nukes on cities to even approach communism's death toll. A regime change, however misguided, here and there won't be enough for centuries.
The US has always valued "principle" over actual results. In Iraq, Saddam was "evil", so he had to go, even though it would leave the entire country in the power vacuum and destroy the livelihoods of the average Iraqi. Ditto for Gaddafi in Libya.
This post is much the same way. A poorer China is only going to deteriorate their human rights. A wealthier China is going to crave for more freedom. This happened in South Korea, which many forget used to be a brutal military dictatorship.
Given that the USA has federal and state laws preventing and punishing even muttering an idea about not selling to Israel, I'd say you should consider adding a few names to that list.
Baby steps. China has fewer political prisoners than they did during the Cultural Revolution. Crowd control uses rubber bullets instead of metal ones. They even allegedly stopped using execution victims' organs 2015, which is doubtful, but they most likely aren't doing it as often (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_transplantation_in_China).
South Korea achieved democracy when their GDP per capita was $4k. China's GDP per capita is approaching $9k. When will they be rich enough that they yearn for democracy?
The PRC will most likely not escape the Middle Income Trap before their population pyramid massively inverts. No other country has aged so quickly at such a large scale before. Their population and working age groups are at the largest they will ever be right now and will steadily decline starting in 5-10 years.
I think collapse of the current government is more likely than a peaceful ROC-esque (Taiwan) transition from dictatorship to democracy.
I'd argue that the ROC transition was not peaceful at all. Thousands of civilians were killed in the February 28 massacre [1] and tens of thousands imprisoned in the ensuing White Terror [2], and martial law did not end until 30+ years later. But now I think Taiwan is by far the leading democracy in east Asia.
This line of thinking just makes people sit on their hands. Individual citizens can always urge their Government to take actions against atrocities such as being committed by China.
The fact that I, a non-citizen can live in US and call out its mass killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan denotes the difference between US and China.
There's no moral equivalence between China's totalitarianism and the U.S. China is worse by orders of magnitude both in degree and kind.
Comparing the two is just an excuse to do nothing.
In the meantime, feel free (pun intended) to protest misdeeds by the U.S., vote for new leaders, organize with like-minded individuals, or buy weapons.
(Aside: many people feel like buying weapons is completely futile against oppression. But it reduces your dependence on the government for protection, and makes it harder for the federal government to convince local police to carry out their dirty work. Also, really bad governments never seem to want citizens to be armed, so perhaps there's a reason for that.)
Meta: I think the rhetoric of humility is more powerful here.
"We are not perfect, but we can't stand by. We have sins of our own that we are trying to rectify, but we cannot allow what you're doing."
The flaw in mutual criticism without admission of guilt is that saying "we're good" even in comparison is so obviously self-serving that it gives your opponent a trivial excuse to dismiss you.
Americans are admitting our flaws, constantly. And when we do that, we don't compare ourselves to China to divert the issue. But debates about China always end up with this diversion into US flaws.
The key logical fallacy is that by cutting trade with China, the various grievances you list will somehow improve. For example, if we don't trade with China, do you think the recently passed Hong Kong Freedom And Democracy act will have any leverage with the Chinese? They will turn Hong Kong into another city in Guangdong the next day.
Thank you for the article. I’ve personally stopped buying Chinese made/owned products due to the HK protests, but it has been extremely difficult to convince friends and families to do the same because I couldn’t properly explain to them why this was such a big issue. Thank you for spending the time to write up this article, and thank you for taking a stand.
We're already starting to get a lot of Whataboutism in the comments here. Yes there are other issues in the world, do you really think we're not aware there's a lot of bad stuff going on in the world??? If you're so concerned with those other issues go write your own blog post about your issue and gather supporters on your own.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadSo true, since its inception with GHW, its execution and realization through Clinton and then once fully engaged the timid, supplicant responses from GW and BO, China has contributed to the stagnation of the blue collar worker on America with the full complicity of Democrats, Republicans and most of Industry and even unions who didn’t oppose their cozy politicians. They all only saw starry dollar signs...
That’s where we are now. People have had enough. That’s why they put up with the guy no one likes because he’s willing to sever that codependent relationship.
Now, if you ask any pol running for the nomination who the greatest threat to America is... it’s not going to be China...
This is a binary choice dem or repub any other choice is a vote for the incumbent
Voting 3rd party exercises your right to say you don't like either of the other 2 candidates. I will not argue which candidate it will help, but i think this line of thinking is detrimental to our voting process and wrong to rub in peoples faces.
Of course I don’t wish to argue the efficacy of my poker moves. They are an expression of my free spirit.
You can say whatever you want, but no one is listening. Voter turnout is so low that the signal of voting 3rd-party is completely lost in the noise of passive non-voting. 3rd-party votes might feel good, but pragmatically (and what is voting except a pragmatic attempt to advance your preferred policy), they are useless.
I encourage everyone on this comment chain to read Clay Shirky's "There is no such thing as a protest vote" [0], and really take it seriously, instead of jumping to thought-terminating cliches by angrily denouncing him as a sheep or whatever. He's right.
[0]: https://medium.com/@cshirky/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-protes...
"Voting 3rd party exercises your right to say you don't like either of the other 2 candidates"
I actually voted for a third party, i liked better than the other 2. It was not a protest. I did just read your link and won't denounce him as anything, but I do think telling people who vote for someone they like who is not in the main 2 parties that their vote was a "throw-away" is again not a good thing.
We will have to agree to disagree on this. Although it is interesting in some other countries where there are more than 2 parties that do all compete.
Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin etc the calculation totally changes of course.
> this line of thinking is detrimental to our voting process and wrong to rub in peoples faces.
Our voting framework is detrimental to our voting process. The line of thinking that a 3rd party vote is a vote wasted is simply an assessment of reality.
There are only two realistic candidates for President in a given US election. And no matter the reasoning, a vote for third party is equivalent to a half vote for both major candidates.
If you truly find equally unappealing, then a third party vote is a (very quiet) way to voice that opinion. Otherwise, you are giving a half vote to your least preferred option.
Here in Australia at least I can do that every time and still have my vote go to the lesser evil due to preferences.
0 may not be equal to 1, but it isn't equal to -1 either. It takes TWO people changing their vote from <your favored major candidate> to <third-party candidate> to match the effect of one person changing from <your favored major candidate> to <the opposing major candidate>.
Misrepresenting him as "willing to sever that codependent relationship" is harmful. He's just as complicit if not more than most politicians, and most of his actions involving China have been inconsistent and self-serving.
> In Japan, honne are a person's true feelings and desires (本音 hon'ne, "true sound"), and tatemae are the behavior and opinions one displays in public (建前 tatemae, "built in front", "façade").
I think what we're seeing is a president who is at odds with the intelligence and diplomatic communities. It's truly testing the ideas of who's actually in charge.
The president assumes since he was elected and runs the executive branch that he has the final say on what will be done, and will go "off-script" in direct communications with other leaders to forward his agenda. The diplomats/intelligence have long-established precedents and procedures and want everyone, including the president, to not rock their boat.
When they are unable to work together, you will see these inconsistent decisions being made.
The problem is this President does not take into account the knowledge and capabilities of his intelligence and diplomatic communities, leading to stupid and naive decisions because the other heads of state are better informed and are better negotiators than him.
The intelligence and diplomatic communities are resources at his disposal he often chooses to ignore, so his screw ups are squarely his own with no one else to blame.
"War is the continuation of politics by other means." - Carl_von_Clausewitz
Praising him doesn't mean he likes him or he'll make of him his friend. It's more of a respect thing. He respects the man for working on the interest of his country.
Does Hitler really not belong on a list like that? So would Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt, of course - but I don't think greatness requires goodness.
Or from popular culture:
> “The wand chooses the wizard, remember … I think we must expect great things from you, Mr Potter … After all, He Who Must Not Be Named did great things – terrible, yes, but great.” - Ollivander
But if all you have is trump saying "good strong leader", then you don't have much. Show actions not words.
Chinese economy is definitely struggling. I don't buy the argument that the trade wars do not work. They hurt both sides. Question is who does it hurt more?
It feels like you haven't thought of it in a game theoretic perspective. In the classical prisoner paradox, the two prisoners gain the most by collaboration. But if one of the prisoner shows no good faith collaboration, it might be necessary for the other prisoner to also stop putting their faith in the uncollaborative one.
The TPP set up an alliance between all of the players in that region and explicitly left out China in order to give that group negotiation power over China. But nuanced policy debate is dead in America so let's use the tool that fucks us all.
The worst part about the trade deal is the harm on our agricultural sector, but I guess at least they voted for their own demise.
On the economics issue though, readers should know he disagrees with economists, who nearly universally agree that trade with China benefits Americans as a whole, with the caveat that there are concentrated losses in certain populations. Economists are highly certain on this, with uncharacteristically few people responding "uncertain" on the survey [0]. You can go through the other surveys on the IGM Forum to see what more common distributions looks like.
[0] http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/china-us-trade
Pick your flavor of elitist sub/urbanism, it doesn't matter, none are substantially different.
(HN's poor Markdown formatter transfers asterisks cross-paragraph, so what was originally "George Mason University (asterisk)" and "(asterisk)Pick your flavor" just made everything between italicized.)
That’s not a problem if we put in place policies and regulations that put our workers on even footing with foreign workers. Benefits, protections (OSHA), anti-dumping, market-based pay (no institutional labor), IP protections, even access to markets, etc. that is handicap any imports proportionately for not meeting those baselines.
Having access to cheap goods might not make up lost jobs, but weren't most of the manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt automated away rather than being offshored? Since 1990, production of metals in the U.S. has held roughly constant, but the number of people employed in the industry has fallen steadily. So it's not like the steel mill jobs from the Rust Belt were shipped overseas, they were just automated away.
I find it a bit hard to understand how someone could suggest that having access to garbage cheap Walmart goods would make up for the utter destruction of a region’s economy. A good place to observe this is southwestern Pennsylvania: there are hundreds of former industrial towns which are now almost completely empty. Drug use is also rampant in these areas and indeed it’s easy to make a direct connection between offshoring jobs and the opioid epidemic.
I wish there was a way to raise the level of discussion on HN. Instead, completely uninformed comments like this get upvoted.
It’s easy to draw abstract analyses from afar, but without actual hands-on experience, you end up with unexpected side effects - like the current rise of populist protectionism.
Not being blasé, but the rust-belt is the trade-off for globalization. The US asked the rest of the world to open up their markets for American goods and services and promised to do the same.
The point is that academic economists pushed policies that had unintended side effects (populism and protectionism) that perhaps they would have anticipated if they had actual experience in the areas that were affected.
Finally, there’s a difference between merely studying a place from afar and enacting policies that dramatically affect said place.
Economists do not enact those policies -- they suggest policies. The fisherman also suggests policies to benefit his own work, just as the steel worker suggests his own policies, and just as the architect, the construction crews, the parents, the etc..
These policies are aggregated, and enacted, by your politician (of cascading hierarchy), whose job is to do that -- review the possible set of policies and their impact on different areas of his total domain, and with this overarching view, enact policies. The fisherman does not himself review his policies for how they would impact the steel worker, and neither does the economist review his policies for how they will impact the presidential election.
If your local politician is blindly following the recommendations of the economist, without concern for the rest of his domain, whose fault is that but the politician's?
The economist is not supposed to be an expert in all things about the world, and it would be absurd to imagine him to be. He is intended to be an expert of his domain (economics), and is meant to be one of many experts, each supplying their own, scoped, understanding of the world.
If the economist claims that his suggested policies will purely benefit all aspects of the economy, and have zero negative impact, then it would be fair to blame him, because he was plainly incorrect about the area he's intended to be an expert in. But if he fairly claimed that it would generally be beneficial, but certain areas of the economy would be impacted negatively in such a fashion, and his predictions are generally correct, then he has done his job without fault. The decision to enact the policy, knowing the benefits and the losses, is not made by him.
Sure, the Chicago school of economics has been banging this particular drum for ages, but it found a responsive ear in the "deciders" in both public and private spheres from the late-80's.
This rust-belt is a symptom on ongoing class warfare, pure and simple - China only happens to be a tool (and a convenient scape goat). The global domination of Wall Street and Silicon Valley is the flip-side of the globalism coin.
I'd say on average the US benefitted, but this hasn't been evenly distributed (capital wins). How do you fix that without using any big-government, pinko communist/socialist interventions? (being sarcastic here, but that's ironically a big part of rust-belt politics).
The bargain of cheaper goods in return for us moving up the value chain may be good for GDP, but we have left tens of millions behind in the process, and they are pissed.
I am pro free-trade, but we need to come up with a system that more equally distributes the gains. You can't kick millions of people out of work, leave them to fend for themselves and not expect massive societal issues.
I want to frame this.
If that’s the trade off, it wasn’t worth it. Glad we are finally being honest, though. Could’ve used a bit more of this frankness in the 1990s.
I mean, pretty sure biologists would disagree. Maybe economists need to rethink their trade if that’s the prevailing mindset. The idea that you are modeling a social structure that you don’t think you need to have ever been a part of or experienced is pretty rich.
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that the US opened its arms to free trade and the rest of world shrugged and took advantage. Non-reciprocal free trade might be good for the US economy on the whole, but when a handful of people control half the wealth, and their half is the part of the economy that reaps the benefit while everyone else sees full time employment harder to come by and inflation adjusted wages stand still for 3 decades, I think it’s probably a bad policy for a democratic republic.
The rest of the world also took hits in some industries - US farm subsidies destroyed corn farming in poor countries
Different US industries fared differently - without globalization, Silicon Valley (and American tech in general) as well as Wall street wouldn't be as globally dominant as they are
> I think it’s probably a bad policy for a democratic republic.
I think it could work great for a democratic republic with sane corporate tax and safety net policies to more evenly distribute the upside
True. But how would modern medicine have faired?
I think the bigger issue with globalization is that it has a huge environmental impact and makes our species more susceptible to the effects of climate change.
We ought to at least enforce free trade policy better; I can tell you first hand that competing against unregulated competitors in manufacturing is hilariously unfair. If we really cared about the Environment or Human rights we would at least level the playing field in markets we control. It’s cheaper to buy from China largely because of our regulatory environment.
That is, it's not the economists job to predict that the demolishment of the rust belt will lead to Trump's election; their job is to predict that the demolishment of the rust belt will bolster the coastal cities, and improve the health of the American economy in general.
Also notably, towns come and go based the industries they support -- it has happened in the past, and will happen in the future. It's simply the inevitable outcome of an ever-evolving economy. How to mitigate the impact of that fact is not the really job of the economist.
And economists are not expected to live in the towns they discuss.. the local politician is intended to represent the local concerns. If he's failing to do so, or failing to have any impact, the economist can merely say "this is what will probably happen, if you do this and don't do that", and nothing will happen.
The same thing happened to artisan economies with factories during modernization, yet people didn't decry the loss of the local blacksmith when the rust belt took over their jobs too.
The transition from local to city to regional to global specialization is a natural effect of economies of scale. Trying to freeze economic development and preserve the status quo is like trying to push water uphill.
In the US we ended up with 40 hour work weeks, and universal high school as a government response. We will need similar large measures to deal with globalization and automation this time as well.
Unfortunately the focus is on blaming immigrants and other countries, not helping the disenfranchised American workers get back on their feet. It's easier to be an angry luddite but it's also historically the wrong side to be on.
The thing is: economists are hardly unbiased and neutral. Their theories are far from scientific truth, and typically embed significant political content.
For instance: "benefit" can be a highly political term. How do "economists" define it and is that the definition we should be using?
This is an interesting article on the subject:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/economists-globalizatio...
> ECONOMISTS ON THE RUN
> Paul Krugman and other mainstream trade experts are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization: It hurt American workers far more than they thought it would. Did America’s free market economists help put a protectionist demagogue in the White House?
Without belaboring the argument which I'm sure everyone's seen before, I would like to re-focus on the point of my comment: The idea that "The financial incentives don’t help any Americans, and in fact, most of us are hurt by this relationship" is counter to everything we know about economics. You can give counter examples yes, but overall trade has been a benefit to Americans, especially for lower-income Americans who rely on low cost goods. We can say with our engineering jobs that we're willing to bear the cost of protectionism, but we don't really bear that cost in the first place.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/the-costs-...
[1] https://fee.org/articles/tariffs-hurt-the-poorest-the-most/
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/the-costs-...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-steel/in-michig...
Decisions are political, and these decisions have been, more or less, presented to the losers as a fait accompli by the winners. It is good and right that such a decision be challenged, and that it potentially be moderated or rolled back entirely.
These decisions also have had important effects outside of the areas typically focused on by "economists" that need to be taken into account.
> The idea that "The financial incentives don’t help any Americans, and in fact, most of us are hurt by this relationship" is counter to everything we know about economics.
The thing is, it's not inaccurate to say economics is a political ideology. We should speak about it honestly: as politics and not science. So it's more accurate to say that idea is "counter to everything we know about [my?] political ideology."
Posting links to blogs from explicitly libertarian think tanks that quote chapter and verse does little to convince me economics is something other than politics by another name.
No, sorry. It's not that clean cut. Your links had economists stating things like "America’s low-income households benefit the most from free trade and having access to cheap imports." But defining good as having access to cheaper goods is an intensely political statement (even ignoring the fact that statement was made though an organization advocating for a particular political policy).
If economics was not political, economists would merely say things like "All else being equal, if our models are correct, increased tariffs will lead to increased domestic prices of international trade goods. However, all else is not equal, so we cannot comment if tariffs are good policy or not."
This is a description of a property or behavior of a system.
> But defining good as having access to cheaper goods is an intensely political statement
This would be apolitical in all but the most semantic of arguments. "Buying the things I want to buy" is assumed to be a good thing by the vast majority of people.
> This would be apolitical in all but the most semantic of arguments. "Buying the things I want to buy" is assumed to be a good thing by the vast majority of people.
That's a myopic view: it's not the only good thing, and it's arguable that it's not even the most important good thing. The politics are embedded in the shape of the myopia.
It’s unlikely the response to not China will be America.
There are reasons to believe the US should still do not China even if it means Bangladesh or Vietnam (in fact, this is exactly what the TPP was supposed to have achieved, and would have better protected worker rights as well as IP...but I guess that wasn’t blunt enough for America).
The US is wealthier than it has ever been thanks to trade abroad. It makes absolutely no sense that the country that has overall benefited the most from trade, is complaining about it.
What the US hasn’t done, is spread the benefits of trade internally. The US economic problems stem from whatever led to a small percentage of the economy pocketing the vast gains. It’s far more likely that tax changes, regulatory changes, and changes in union power have a lot more to do with that than anything else.
But it’s always easier to blame Johnny Foreigner and people have been doing it for millennia, so there’s no reason to believe the US would be immune from it.
Other places don't cheat with market access or steal IP anywhere as much as China. Any economic rebalancing would have been far more gradual.
"What the US hasn’t done, is spread the benefits of trade internally. The US economic problems stem from whatever led to a small percentage of the economy pocketing the vast gains."
You mean policies such as open trade with China, which was inherently biased towards profits to the top, given the way offshoring worked?
This does not mean there weren't other factors at work, rather that China trade was one policy in an array of policies with a similar outcome.
"But it’s always easier to blame Johnny Foreigner and people have been doing it for millennia, so there’s no reason to believe the US would be immune from it. "
My country profited from the US's Free Trade advocacy, and I still think the US's China policy was either insane or driven by elite concerns. It's one thing to have free trade, another to have one-way free trade with a country that cheated so openly, and is now a superpower competitor.
And more unequal than it has been since the Gilded Age, when the infamous robber-barons ruled the economy unrestrained.
As you said, the US hasn't "spread the benefits of trade internally", but that has a lot to do with globalization. Workers lost bargaining power and income as competition for their jobs increased due to globalization, and unions became weak when companies responded to strikes by moving operations overseas.
The benefits of globalization naturally flow to foreign workers and the few Americans in charge, while the cost of globalization falls on American workers.
I don't see the problem. USA has practically no leverage in the trade relationships with China. They can't change China for the better. So cutting China off is a net benefit even if other countries will take its role. That also means USA can now trade with countries that actually respect American laws and do in fact share American values like democracy or human rights.
This idea that we must sell our soul for a small profit must die.
That may be true, but are there any less biased and more neutral experts on the economy to turn to, or do we just throw up our hands and say that no one knows anything about the economy and thus all opinions are equally valid?
The main benefit that they give for Americans is that everything became cheaper. We can buy cheaper phones, appliances, cars, clothing, and household goods. But that's exactly what most of these things are - cheaper. We're importing a vast quantity of crappy junk, exporting untold pollution and human suffering onto factory workers and laborers in China, and hollowing out the American middle class in the process.
When presented with evidence about the declining quality and huge externalities of imported goods, they hand-wave about rational actors and price discovery and how consumers will just select for the products that minimize heavy metal pollution in some far off mine in rural China. There's similar hand-waving about how Americans will simply find new jobs when all the factories in Ohio automate or close. When products die more frequently because they're not engineered for durability or serviceability, they hand wave again about how consumers are making informed decisions to maximize their utility at the time of purchase.
The truth is a lot of this was a great con with a thin veneer of respectable economics on it. A few of the economists were in on the con, but most of them were taken for a ride. There were a few warning us all along about market failures, wealth inequality, disruption of rapid globalization, and unchecked externalities, but most just wanted in on the money.
So, well, I would add disclaimer to not blindly trusts the economists on this one. Their opinion are probably much better than the one from the average Joe, and also much better than anything you'll get out of the news or a politician's mouth, but not completely reliable either... and the most certain a economist is of it, the less I would trust him.
Because the expenses that are killing us (housing, health care, education) aren't outsourced at all.
As far as I can tell (and according to most economists), the idea that "we can fix the middle class by going after China trade" is intuitive, simple, and wrong. And it's popular on both sides of the aisle. And historically, it's always been easier to find some group to blame than to fix structural economic issues.
So I think the further we go along this path, the less likely it is we will end up fixing our actual problems, and the more likely countries will be distracted by trade wars and maybe real wars in various parts of the world as those problems increase, and various groups are blamed instead of fixing economic policy.
This is separate from the human rights issues. But I think if we want to put penalties to try to address the human rights issues, we should be clear about that. Because if the penalty is for other political reasons it doesn't add an incentive to improve human rights, since that wouldn't make the penalty go away.
Why would we want this?
Because the alternative is a destruction of the USA manufacturing sector. Moving those jobs overseas only helps two groups:
1.) The Chinese 2.) The owners of capital in America, high up business men (the so described 1%).
The third group who may be helped, are everyday Americans who benefit from cheap goods.
What would imposing large tariffs do?
Goods are more expensive, so people can buy less. TVs, Clothes, Cars etc are more expensive. But middle class Americans keep middle class jobs. Right now the policies are ultra capitalist, the middle class is being gutted and replaced with a heroin epidemic.
Why dont we replace their jobs and retrain the workers?
The retraining of older workers for new industries has never been shown to work. Its an economic theory that has yet to play out in any economy on a large scale. I believe the root of Americas economic woes among the middle classes is this concept, which was conceived of and pushed hard in the 90s. Behind the scenes academics like Noam Chomsky fought hard against this concept, but the arguments never trickled down into the public.
In short, tariffs stop the outsourcing and middle class destruction. Things get more expensive, we accept that. If automation kills the jobs here, it still holds off the destruction of the middle class for another 15 - 30 years. Which is better than nothing.
I agree that retraining doesn't work. But I disagree that stopping trade can save the middle class. Manufacturing is only 7.9% of jobs [1] and stopping all trade will only slow the decline, with huge amounts of collateral damage for other jobs. Almost all jobs used to be in farming, but now they aren't. Manufacturing isn't going to be something that employs a huge number of people anymore. In China they're automating away jobs that pay $10,000 a year.
How are you going to help retail workers, 9.8% of jobs [1], as automation (Amazon warehouses) takes their jobs? Tariffs don't help them any although they'll pay for them.
There's real problems for the middle class and/or certain geographic regions, but stopping trade is a solution that almost no economists think will work. I'd rather try something more promising like UBI.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...
The ability for an individual to choose their favored tax jurisdiction is an artifact of law, and laws can be changed. If America decides to clamp down on the 1%, it can also create laws to disincentivize leaving for tax reasons, like Saverin did.
Given the condition of the lowest of our nation, "traitors" isn't an unreasonable way to describe the 1%, and no one in the 1% has ever seen a firing squad or the electric chair. Not even lethal injection. If they aren't subject to the same rules as Americans, are they really Americans? If they have a higher amount of wealth than sovereign countries, can they be considered anything but sovereign?
Germany did in the 40s. There's a reason this rhetoric popular with the socialists in the US sounds very familiar.
Lots more killing of non-German citizens, of course...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_casualties_in_World_War...
Also, it goes without saying of course that it would also hurt the Chinese workers who are equally deserving of good employment as their American counterparts, and it's not clear why discounting their welfare is anything other than tribalism.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...
[2]https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/how-much-would-an-all-america...
I, and I’m sure many many others, would be willing to pay a little more if I know that money is staying here and supporting families in this country. I can do without more plastic crap from China, and I consider it strategically important that high tech manufacturing comes back to the US. For defense reasons, among others. I’m sure someone will link the Wikipedia page with some neat plots from “economics 101”, which is fine. But some things are worth paying a little more for.
This mercantilism on display here will be extremely harmful to people in America who rely on low cost imported goods just for the sake of predominantly wealthy people attempting to play geopolitics. If you're willing to harm poor Americans and cut trade then please state it like this, don't wrap it up in patriotism.
And to expand on the 'jobs coming back'. Given the high production costs that American companies would have to live with would instantly make their products unattractive in the rest of the world, where people are still going to buy Chinese phones. Giving companies like Apple an incentive to drastically increase the pace of automation, which again is the primary eliminator of jobs.
And even worse, unless you put a tariff on Samsung who will still produce in countries with access to cheap labour, american products will be uncompetitive in their own markets. If you do eliminate competition, the incentive to innovate will vanish. This in fact already happened in the US in the 80s, when the Reagan administration engaged in a trade-war with the Japanese to protect the automotor industry. We all know what this did to the american car market as a result.
This story is improbable because the overwhelming majority of America's poorest are employed in the domestic service industry who are not facing negative exposure to international trade. Every store clerk, every McDonalds worker, every garbage man, cleaning lady, janitor, nanny, teacher and so on will be one-sided losers of an increase in prices due to reduced trade.
The benefactors will be a relatively small number of American manufacturing workers (given that it's overall only a small source of employment), who already earn solidly middle-class wages.
Why are they poor? Hasn't globalization directly contributed to making the American working class poorer? For instance: Offshoring a factory obviously eliminates those workers' jobs. The owner of a American factory can also use the threat of offshoring to keep wages down. The owner is better off, but the workers clearly aren't.
One of the obnoxious things about free-trade ideology is that the cause of problems and the proposed solutions often seem to be one and the same: more market faster.
My understanding is that our standard of living has continued to increase throughout my lifetime, and thus that the American working class is on the whole richer than it was decades ago.
> The owner is better off, but the workers clearly aren't.
Aren't they? If they make $10/hour instead of $15/hour, but the goods they buy are 40% the cost that they would have been, their $10/hour is effectively $16/hour (I think I got the math right there).
Of course, maybe they are making $9/hour, or maybe they lost their jobs after all, or maybe the goods they buy are 95% the cost that they would have been … but the principle still holds that they can be doing less well than they would like but still better than they were.
I think it's a mistake to treat it like a math equation, since (among other things) that engages in the fallacy of equating Homo economicus with Homo sapiens.
But if you do want to treat it like a math equation like that. The workers may still be worse off because they don't just buy trade goods. The owner's income didn't drop, and maybe increased, so he can use greater relative income to bid up non-trade goods like real estate, healthcare, and education, pushing those things out of reach of the workers.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say in your post, that you'd like to live like a WW2 soldier on the homefront rationing food without a phone? Or that you think there is majority support for your romanticised wartime lifestyle?
The replies to my original post are getting increasingly strange and unhinged
So now we need to keep the status quo because they are no longer middle class?
Your argument doesn’t make sense and until you understand that Trump wins re-election easily.
Even if he was not particularly effective in improving their lot, at least he followed through on his promises instead of preaching to them how raping them was good for them.
Globalization went too far.
The Apple example is a good one, but, again, I find it very hard to believe that an 80% (or hell even 90%) automated manufacturing footprint here in the US is a) infeasible and/or b) undesirable relative to the status quo.
I’m tired of the fatalism about this issue. It’s pathetic and signals that America is near collapse if we are essentially just giving up on our industrial base and willing to be reliant on cheap consumer goods from China.
The US could compete with foreign countries on manufacturing, but not through human labour unless you want Americans to work 9/9/6 in hazardous conditions and under environmental degradation. The dematerialisation of the US economy has made it cleaner, more energy-efficient, less physically demanding, and richer, because it extracts value from its global IP, and it has given Chinese workers a step up the ladder to prosperity. If manufacturing is coming back its in the form of robots, and that does very little for displaced workers.
There is no reason for fatalism because the premise is all wrong that deindustrialisation is bad. It's not. The problem the US has is a cultural one where the vision of the Ford company man working the same job at the conveyor belt with a dog and car and a house in the suburbs hasn't been updated. Adjust the political system to compensate the segments of the population that lose out, find different ways to provide meaningful work, and we'll be better off, instead of making everyone worse off.
“We consume a lot of goods therefore we are prosperous.”
Utter nonsense. I implore you to actually hang out in, not just visit, these places that got blown up so that some companies could make some basis points on their quarterly returns.
It’s also amazing that you’re saying that the “cultural” hangings on about the mid 20th century are something to be readjusted. Dude, these people are not going to become firmware engineers at night school. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting what was a normal family life at that time to exist in 2019. If your claim is that that is not possible, then declare what sacrifices are required. Did globalism make this impossible?
On the other hand, perhaps a reduction in frivolous consumption would be good for an ailing planet.
> it's not clear why discounting their welfare is anything other than tribalism.
They are citizens of an authoritarian regime, and for the most part, deeply nationalistic. Their labor produces the regime's prosperity, and enables the very economic influence that leads the international community to constantly turn a blind eye to its human rights abuses.
I don't think it's controversial or inhumane to suggest that we should allocate resources to those who play by (or belong to groups that play by) fairer rules.
https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
Or in Austria: "The plant, a two-hour drive southwest of Vienna, will need just 14 employees to make 500,000 tons of robust steel wire a year—vs. as many as 1,000 in a mill with similar capacity built in the 1960s." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-21/how-just-...
You know what, I’ll start caring about their wellbeing soon as they give two shits about the American workers they have displaced.
It’s their economy, they can fix their own problems.
The world has too many people to support as is, so it is beneficial if automation reduces the number of workers needed in the long run. But sending all of the factories out of the US benefits no one.
And it wouldn't matter one whit, because 90% of the expenses of the average American aren't going into buying consumer goods.
They go into buying transportation, medicine, education, food, and housing (With the price of housing rising to consume all of the middle class's economic surplus). None of those things are made in China.
Housing is the most fun one, because no matter how much people save, the price of houses rises to eat all of those savings. The only reason for why a house can cost a million dollars, is that people have saved that amount of money up. If that money weren't there, housing prices would be lower.
Well, that's not exactly true. There is at least one person who ran his campaign saying exactly that- China was America's greatest threat... He's "the guy nobody likes"... he is the current President!
The current buffoon political administration has identified a surface problem, but not the causes and certainly not a solution. The only solution I see comes in two parts: 1) The world needs to make China persona non grata. 2) Shareholders and corporate boards need to hold corporations accountable, not just on a moral basis, but also in terms of good business. Foreign companies cannot win there because the playing field isn't fair.
Thus, while yes we need politicians who can defend American interests, we also need to hold their corporate masters accountable.
This leading argument is not specific to China at all and would equally apply to India and most poor countries. Severing trade with all those countries would severely hurt their economies and their citizens.
It's the same logic behind "dey terk er jerbs" but somehow made reasonable by throwing accusations of fascism.
If China is an ocean instead it’s still gone, forever, either to other cheap country or robots.
It’s currently politically convenient to hate China, but quit blaming every woe on China.
The biggest issue with him is how he's destroyed our system of alliances, which administrations of both parties have defended and cultivated over decades. See, for instance, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/18/china-signs-defe....
This is disastrous. It's insane that the US is losing South Korea to China, considering we sacrificed tens of thousands of soldiers and considered starting nuclear war to prevent it in the 1950s. And people just shrug, because to the extent people care about politics right now, it's to focus on impeachment hearings, which themselves are happening because Trump blackmailed an important ally.
The core foreign policy of whoever is President should be recognizing China as our most formidable strategic competitor and working to maintain and build upon a system of alliances to limit its power and reach. Instead Trump is just a thug trying to shake down our allies for cheap wins and PR releases based on an idiotic understanding of American foreign policy interests.
Allegedly blackmailed, which nobody who was actually involved corroborates, to investigate exactly how it is that Joe Biden's son managed to get a very high-paying make-work job on the board of a Ukrainian oil company, and Joe Biden bragged on videotape about how he did infact blackmail the Ukrainian Government to fire the prosecutor who was investigating that.
What we're discovering is not that Trump is that out there. It's that the entire US Government and political elite has been that out there for many years now, and the entire mainstream media conspired to ignore it and cover it up. As they are continuing to do now.
What seems to be happening is people are losing some of their dirty money connections (like these post term engagements and talk circuits and appointments where you have no expertise, etc and these people are furious and upset. So they are willing to engage in destabilization or at the minimum distractive tactics (collusion didn’t work, let’s try this for that, no, let’s try bribery, if that doesn’t work it’ll be something else).
Not to say the current president is a Saint, but it would appear he’s ruffled some important feathers, otherwise they just wait him out.
Well, they asked a similar question during one of the democratic party debates [1] and some candidates said Trump but others pointed out climate change, Russia meddling in elections, China, etc. But the question was greatest "geopolitical threat" so I guess it's not exactly the same.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/2020-democratic-debate-respo...
The author of this article doesn’t understand how the presidential bully pulpit slowly changes the national conversation to war.
Not to say that China isn’t violating human rights. They are. But we, the Americans, are the ones who started this fight by goading them on.
Also: the crux of the argument in this article is “trade is bad for the little guy because our jobs are gone” which is one of the memes our political establishment is using to get us interested in war.
Dear author, can you go deeper into why trade is bad for anyone other than the 1%? Something beyond a ramble and some half baked repetitions of what we hear every day?
That depends on how you measure it. There's a good case to be made for the thesis that we've been in a trade war ever since opening trade with China, but it's only recently that we've actually started counter-attacking.
Also, while it's gained traction recently, the political scientists I know personally have been decrying China's human rights violations for the past 20 years. Some of them were hoping things would improve as trade continued and the Chinese economy forced liberalization on the political sphere. That doesn't seem to be the way things have played out.
Just because the fight is now verbalized and on the forefront of the public's mind doesn't mean it wasn't already occurring, just not acknowledged. And I don't see the threat of war as being a serious one, given the nuclear deterrents of both sides.
In 2015, during the umbrella movement, there was discontent in Hong Kong over the taken-away promise of near-future free elections in 2017. In 2019 Hongkongers have their rights taken away NOW and are affected NOW. In 2019 we have a fairly accurate picture of what's going on in Xinjiang. The list could go on...
Americans goaded them on to human rights abuses? I strongly suspect that many Uighurs would be in concentration camps even in America had done everything that Beijing wanted.
Did America steal Chinese intellectual property and build entire industries based on copying Chinese products?
A trade war doesn't just mean tariffs, it can happen in various forms. American companies did not have a fair game from the getgo competing with chinese companies, it's just that no one cared until now.
So, who started this?
I would also disagree with calling a fairly well cited call to action as 'half baked repetitions of what we hear every day'.
Could you go deeper into how we, the Americans, 'goaded China on' to commit human rights atrocities.
Yes, the current presidency is partly to blame, but don't pretend that it's the only, or even primary cause of the current narrative.
edit: DDOS on sr.ht starts in 3... 2... 1...
And if the US wants to get serious about the use of trade sanctions against human rights violations, there are a lot of places closer to home that it could look at. Not to mention the laws against boycotting a certain country for its human rights violations.
There's also the fantasy of assuming that China's next move after the trade sanctions would be a de-escalation. There's a lot of escalation opportunities for them. Like Taiwan.
(Let's be clear, this is not an apology for the human rights violations by China, which are very real especially in Xinjiang; what I am asking for is the same to be applied consistently and not driven by straightforward nationalism)
Completely agree. I very much empathize with the author and this issue is the only one where I feel some sort of connection with the current POTUS, but the engineering-at-scale capacities in the United States pale in comparison to China for a variety of reasons - some due to a cheaper labor force and more "flexible" labor laws, and some simply due to culture.
We do not have this capacity now and it is dubious that we can build it quickly without serious governmental subsidies and efforts not seen since World War 2. I'm personally good with the change, but it will cost billions if not trillions of dollars in lost productivity and marginal costs over the next decade or two, and this is not something to handwave away.
We were very worried about the USSR for the same reason. But there was an iron curtain, and you had to actually be invaded to lose your freedom.
Now, the CCP seems able to curtail worldwide freedom through its trade policy, which is a weird thing nobody expected.
i understand that gives you a certain amount of power that other employees, say of Apple, may not have. kudos to you for using it fruitfully - sincerely.
i am sure this will come across as tin foily, but i would advise you to monitor your digital assets and maybe even personal ones for probing/attack/etc. you're publishing an anti-CCP piece on a widely trafficked web property and are easily identifiable. you are making an enemy of a powerful adversary.
appreciate the piece and best of luck.
If you really care, reach out directly to the merchants you buy from. Tell them you used to be a loyal customer, but you won't buy from them again until they stop carrying products made in China. Get your friends and coworkers to do the same, and keep the pressure on. If they go for it, follow through by rewarding them with your loyalty, and broadcast that win as publicly as possible. Talk about it, hashtag it, whatever. Organize.
Changing individual consumption habits rarely amounts to much more than virtue signalling.
And don't toss your existing stuff. You already paid for it, so it's not helping China anymore, and throwing it away doesn't hurt them. If anything, selling it to someone else reduces demand for new products (by exactly 1 unit).
Gandhi protested against the British by spinning his own fabric, making his own shoes, and being completely independent. It made no difference to the British companies, but it sent a powerful message to the nation that Indians can be independent.
Do not underestimate or discourage people from doing what they principally object, even if practically it makes no sense or has no objective benefit.
BTW, I'm Canadian but was from mainland. There are also a lot of debate inside WeChat groups which include oversea Chinese who have access to all information.
Anything else sets up a perverse incentive to execute more undesirables.
For the other part, I have trouble understanding why a dead person would care about anything after their death ...although I can understand them having wishes before death, but any such wishes should be weighed in context for their reasonableness given all factors.
You may say you wouldn't care if your dead carcass was, say, grotesquely abused for someone else's amusement—after all, you're dead and no longer around to have any feelings about it—but how would your children feel? How would you feel if that was the fate awaiting your life partner?
The shared endeavor of human society entitles people to dignity even in death. That includes the right to bodily integrity.
Yeah that would be disrespectful. Kind of moving the goalposts though to use that example when talking about organ transplant, something that helps people who might otherwise die. Obviously I am not saying execution is worth it for that. Just more that if someone is dead already for whatever reason, it's hard to see it as a bad thing to help the living, if that can be done.
I mean if we're going to fashion extreme examples for dramatic effect, that can be done on the other side too. Imagine if the relatives have racist objections to donating an organ, and let someone die because their own feelings would be hurt if they saw a person of the "wrong" race being helped. How do you weigh their racist feelings, versus the life being saved? It's not that clear to me that their feelings should be at the forefront when other factors are considered.
I agree that dignity in death is a good thing. Just not so certain as you that there is only one way to get there. And none of this is to claim that China does what they do with dignity... I highly doubt that. But organ transplants are not such a terrible thing.
Including things that harm others or infringe on their rights.
So if that is guiding policy, policy is going to be a mess at worst or severely hobbled at best.
China doesn’t generally hold religion in high regard when formulating policy. They are more guided by practicality and expediency.
That puts them in conflict with many western values but it’s interesting to look at it from their perspective.
For those people who believe that organ donation is a grotesque abuse, that is bad but it should be weighed against other bad things. People dying is also bad. Which is worse? Grotesque abuse of a corpse, or letting someone die? China appears to have made a decision on this question.
> I have trouble understanding why a dead person would care about anything after their death
Examining the unstated implications of your argument, taken on its face, is not the same as moving the goalposts. Saying "I don't care what happens after I die, so no need to even ask if you can take my organs... except hang on, no, don't abuse my body in weird ways, I'm not okay with that"–THAT'S moving the goalposts.
> it's hard to see it as a bad thing to help the living
except to the extent that 1) harvesting organs from political prisoners is just about as close to a bad thing as you can imagine, and 2) even if we're not talking about China in particular, involuntary organ extraction harms the dignity of living kin.
> Imagine if the relatives have racist objections to donating an organ, and let someone die because their own feelings would be hurt if they saw a person of the "wrong" race being helped. How do you weigh their racist feelings, versus the life being saved?
The right to bodily integrity, to the choice about how your body is used, is unaffected by your motives. A right does not cease to become a right once you disagree with how someone wishes to exercise it.
You don't want your organs to go to a black man? Exercise your right to bodily integrity by not agreeing to be an organ donor.
That's a part of the problem here. People speak their mind, disappear into a black bag and end up donating their organs to a Party member's daughter five months later.
The other major part being that there's very little due process, or fair justice, not in the way that you or I would expect it. Certainly not with lives on the line.
Worrying about wasted organs misses the point by an absurd distance.
https://citizenlab.ca/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/
We should not feel threatened to criticize a foreign country. Speak up fearlessly against China. Now is the time.
Personally, my thoughts are in line with the author’s, but realistically we need to be looking at unified trade sanctions on key goods and potentially clamping down on foreign investment in both directions.
People who are gainfully employed do not have a problem with the cost of general goods like food and electronics; this stuff is cheap.
The problem (not only in the US) for most is under/unemployment and the cost of housing.
Because the jobs have been shipped offshore.
Nazis - tight control over information, propaganda, and news CCP - even tighter control over information through technology
Nazis - serious degradation in rule of law across the nation CCP - lacks legal arbitration (ie. 99% conviction rate)
Nazis - had an army solely devoted to the party and not the German people CCP - the PLA is beholden to the CCP and none else
Nazis - outlawed all parties except the Nazi party CCP - no other parties exist in China
Nazis - did not prioritize the individual, prioritized the 1000 year reich CCP - has no care for individuals, but is focused on the CCP's long term vision at any cost
Nazis - at first territorial ambitions to land it believed was their right CCP - territorial ambitions in Hong Kong and Taiwan
Nazis - worked hard to build its military to compete & dominate globally CCP - boosted spending on military 20% last year
Nazis - significant belief of exceptionalism with strong nationalist undertones CCP - a lot of nationalism coming from the top & propaganda arms ie global times
Nazis - secret police ie Gestapo CCP - similar tactics to secret police ie interrogating or detaining reporters, insurgents, and stories of people disappearing
Nazis - fought against religiosity of its people CCP - ethnically cleansed certain minority groups while closing monitoring others
Differing Nazis - serious degree of racism CCP - small degree of racism (ie Han vs minorities)
Nazis - severe punishment and brutally violent tactics ie death camps CCP - less severe in terms of execution and punishment ie concentration camps
Idk these are just some thoughts off the top of my head. Is this uncalled for invective? I know everything is now compared to Nazis these days, but perhaps it's like the boy who cried wolf and now there's a reason to. Btw I am not trying to compare severity, just some similarities. I realize it's nearly impossible to do something worse than the holocaust, and in many ways I doubt the CCP ever would. Also add to the list if you think of anything to change or add.
In 1997 HK had 1/3 of the GDP of mainland China and was the only way for Western companies to interact with China. Today HK has 3% of the GDP of mainland China and a huge part of this is because China has opened its borders to foreign investment. Shenzhen has a thriving economy because if you're a western company and want to do business with China, you can just go there and do business. In the past you would have had to go through Hong Kong to make this happen.
The Hong Kong riots were sparked because China wanted to extradite someone who murdered his girlfriend in Taiwan and then went to hide in HK to avoid extradition. If the same thing happened in the united states we would be equally furious. Of course I'm not stupid, I know that this extradition is part of a growing feeling of increasingly powerful influence of China on HK, and I know this because this how independent nations feel when the US similarly puts extradition pressure on other countries. Look what happened with Julian Assange!
But the protests in Hong Kong aren't just about some emergent "evil" coming from China. Their part of the economic and social anxiety that comes from having your economic power completely change in the span of 20 years. In America we know power and independence go hand in hand.
I'm equally as wary of growing Chinese political power as I am of US Hegemony. But the current strife in Hong Kong is perfect propaganda fuel for both the US and China. Both nations essentially get to stoke the flames of nationalism while HK suffers. I strong encourage people to at least question the prevailing narratives from both sides and start to look at the economic realities of what's happening.
The CCP was not legally obligated to do so, of course; Drew IS wrong about the illegality of the CCP's behavior here. And as a practical matter, trying to deprive China of the territory of Hong Kong is a fool's errand.
But the talented people of HK who stayed in 1997 in the hopes that the rest of China would meet them closer to halfway do not need to remain. And, now that close to a billion Chinese have been lifted out of grinding poverty by the economic policies of the last 40 years, any economic moral obligation the West had towards the Chinese people has been met; there's no particular reason for the West to further subsidize Chinese development over further development of India, Indonesia, etc.
[0] - https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Trade-war/Hong-Kong-s-tariff... [1] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/183...
There are no protests there. They were also a former Westen colony and now under 1 country, 2 systems like Hong Kong.
The only difference is their GDP per capita is almost twice that of Hong Kong’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-3_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_Assembly_of_Macau
First, 93% of protesters were angry due to the lack of universal suffrage. That’s the number one reason for anger, according to a survey. (http://theconversation.com/hong-kong-protesters-dont-identif...)
Do you have any poll/survey results to support your claim that Hong Kongers keep on protesting because they feel economically less important to China? How can you attribute the protests to purely economic reasons and ignore this even more important political factor?
Second, Hong Kong is still extremely important economically to China:
* It accounts for about 70% of foreign direct investment (FDI) to China (https://santandertrade.com/en/portal/establish-overseas/chin...).
* Lots of mainland companies opt to list at Hong Kong stock exchange rather than Shanghai, e.g. Alibaba
Other reasons why Hong Kong is important:
https://www.piie.com/blogs/china-economic-watch/why-china-st...
> Hong Kong riots where sparked because China wanted to extradite someone who murdered his girlfriend in Taiwan and then went to hide in HK to avoid extradition.
This was an excuse that has been debunked:
http://shanghaiist.com/2019/06/16/taiwan-lambasts-hong-kong-...
This needs to stop. I see this behavior on HN, which is frustrating, counterproductive, anti-free speech and extremely left-winged.
Another problem is to try being a moderate in these liberal pockets of America. The moment you pick out a couple of things that I agree about what Trump is doing, I get intense opposition, lose friendships, get judged, etc.
The Bay Area, the Silicon Valley, the 3 trillion dollar neighbor of America is a suffocating place for anyone who has dissenting opinion about some liberal concepts.
Silicon Valley people think that moderates and right-wing folks hate gays, lgbt community and loves guns, hates China which is far from the truth. Then they feel to justify themselves by overcompensating, supporting China and smearing the truth. Ironically, they make fun of right-wing echo chambers.
If your political ideology looks away from objective truth, you need to question it. No matter how “conservative” or “liberal”.
This is from my personal experience, your MMV.
This kind of censorship isn't even targeting hate speech, and it drives me crazy. Why downvote them?
I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
There is a great deal of difference between giving users the tools to express disagreement and giving them the tools to block out the opinions of those with which I disagree.
Finally, quoting Paul Graham isn't really an argument. Fine, it's his site, but I'm allowed to say I disagree with how the voting on his site is implemented.
"There is a definite right-libertarian bias on HN" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21432833
"If you go against any kind of socially conservative or libertarian perspective it will get down voted and very likely flagged" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643695
"chilling effect on discourse from leftists" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20804464
"a leftist can't have a sane discussion on this website" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15926162
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13110004&sort=byDate&prefix&pa...
I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
It's not censorship, censorship would be 'dang doing it.
The downvote really suppressed free speech. I agree with you on that part. But that's the reality everybody need to accept.
I also understand that this may not apply to other people's experience in the Silicon Valley, thererfore I said that your mileage may vary.
The bigger question is - Why should we allow Chinese nationals in America (even more so in Australia) to supress free speech and promote CCP ideals? Its one thing to do it inside China, a whole another level to spread it across the world as immigrants.
For extreme examples: "I don't vaccinate my kids because I don't want them to have autism" is both contrarian and sort of actively disproved by evidence, so downvoting on the latter grounds is entirely reasonable. If you want to run a worthwhile discussion site, the discussions have to be meaningful to discuss. "The open-source movement is a mistake and the world would be better served by changing the Open Source Definition" is a contrarian, unpopular opinion, but there isn't clear evidence either way as to its merit (among other things, it's more of a straight-up opinion than a report of facts), so it's worth discussing, and shouldn't be downvoted just for being contrarian.
The comment above mostly made testable claims about Silicon Valley's culture. "I feel like the SJWs have gone too far" is an opinion. "People cannot criticize the Chinese government in lunchrooms" is a claim that can be proven or disproven.
We have a higher percentage of people in jail then China by a lot (5x). Many of them are in jail for political/racial reasons (the Drug War, Immigration).
We have the NSA spying on all of us. As well as Google, FB, etc.
We treat our protestors horribly as well, look at what the FBI did to black rights protesters or look at how the Dakota Access pipeline protesters were treated.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with Drew on this article, and I'd support a boycott, but in the words of someone I'm not a fan of: "Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world."
Crack cocaine carried a much harsher sentence then Cocaine, a law that very clearly targeted black people. [2]
Marijuana use is the same between white and black people, but black people are 3.73x more likely to be arrested for it.[3]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/other/cracks-system-20-years-unjust-fed...
[3] https://www.aclu.org/report/report-war-marijuana-black-and-w...
[2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/06/14/_if_to...
[3] Black people getting arrested at a higher rate doesn't make the policies racist. It either makes the cops racist (possible) or it means that there are other factors beyond skin color that are affecting the stats (most likely explanation).
encouraged/demanded by the US economic doctrine for the last 40+ years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapore...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade_in_China#Ov...
http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications/topic-overviews/con...
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/06/14/a-change-in-russia...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/08/28/ten-years-drug-policy-fa...
You'll notice a lot of countries on the list who aren't exactly best buds with the US.
* Hundreds of human rights lawyers (not even dissidents, just the LAWYERS who defended people) were snatched by gestapo all over China in what is known as the 709 Crackdown [1].
* One of those lawyers, Wang Quanzhang was sentenced to 4.5 years [2] for "subversion of state power". But that's not enough. China actually went after Wang's 6-year-old son [3], forcing him out of his school and banning any other school from taking him in.
* A dissident, Wang Bingzhang [4] was kidnapped by Chinese agents in Vietnam and sentenced to life in prison after a closed trial that lasted 1 day.
* A man wore a t-shirt with the word "Xitler" on it and was disappeared [5]. Eventually he was tried for "subversion of state power" while barred from meeting with lawyers [6]
* Another man, Wang Meiyu [7] hold up a placard calling for Xi’s resignation & democracy. He was arrested for "picking quarrels”. He ended up dead in custody.
* A woman live streamed herself splashing ink on a Xi poster [8]. She was disappeared [9]. Her last social media update: "Right now there are a group of people wearing uniforms outside my door. I’ll go out after I change my clothes. I did not commit a crime. The people and groups that hurt me are the ones who are guilty". Later on there was report of her being sent to a psychiatric hospital [10]
* After the ink-splash woman's disappearance her father made a series of broadcast to call attention to her plight. He ended up getting taken away by the police in the middle of a live stream [11]
* 5 people associated with a Hong Kong bookstore that sold titles such as "Xi Jinping and His Six Women" were disappeared [12]. Only one managed to escape back to HK. He held a press briefing to tell the world about his kidnapping by China. He's now in exile in Taiwan. The other 4 are still somewhere in China.
And, of course:
* 1.5 million [13] Uyghurs rounded up in concentration camps
* Genocide through forced abortions [14] on Uyghur women
* Sexual torture [15] of Uyghur women such as rape & rubbing intimate parts with chili paste.
* Leaked footage [16] of a large number of blindfolded Uyghurs shackled together
* A Canadian journalist wanted to debunk reports of Chinese anti-Muslim repression so he went on a stage-managed show tour put on by China [17]. That means he only saw a fake Potemkin village that China actually thought was acceptable by Western standard. But the brutality of even this fake Potemkin village stunned him. Now imagine what's really happening in the real concentration camps where millions of Uyghurs are being held. Imagine how bad the true situation is.
* Using minorities & political prisoners as free organ farms [18]. A doctor's eye witness account [19]: 'The prisoner was brought in, tied hand and foot, but very much alive. The army doctor in charge sliced him open from chest to belly button and exposed his two kidneys. Then the doctor ordered Zheng to remove the man’s eyeballs. Hearing that, the dying prisoner gave him a look of sheer terror, and Zheng froze. “I can’t do it,” he told the doctor, who then quickly scooped out the man’s eyeballs himself.'
* Call for retraction of 400 Chinese scientific papers [20] amid fears organs came from Chinese prisoners
* 15 Chinese studies [21] retracted due to fears they used Chinese prisoners' organs
* Cultural genocide (and organ harvests, of course) [22]. A uyghur's testimony: "First, children were stopped from learning about the Quran, then from going to mosques. It was followed by bans on ramadan, growing beards, giving Islamic names to your baby, etc. Then our language was attacked – we didn’t get jobs if we didn’t know Mandarin. Our passports were collected, we were told to spy on each other, innocent Uyghur prisoners were killed for organ harvesting"
* China is moving beyond Uyghur and cracking down on its model ...
I’m sure this thread will have a lot of whataboutism. Remember what your parents always told you: two wrongs don’t make a right.
Edit: After reading responses, I realize that there is a better question to ask: What people in the US in general do to help (vote a certain way, write to certain politicians, change purchasing habits), and how can I specifically participate in that?
One idea would be to run workshops for children/or families teaching them how to repair their devices, and which devices to get if they want them to last (think upgradability, battery-replacement, similar). If we're wanting to lessen China's power over the working class, making people capable of maintaining electronics in the same way they can maintain cars will go a long way. Bonus points if you teach them how to reinstall operating systems without bricking their systems.
Another idea would be to use your programming ability to create software to help people: think getting past censorship, keeping communications secure, similar. China and Hong Kong both are more or less tech wonderlands, solving the UX issues that stop anyone from throwing a single-board computer (think Orange/Raspberry Pi) online and using it to communicate over the open web and store data without fear of it being compromised in some way by doing nothing more than flashing an OS image and booting would mean that almost everyone would gain, but especially people in those countries.
Really? I didn’t know protesters targeted the local tycoons who made their lives unbearable in the past 20 years. Not to mention the humanity of laundering money for the worst thugs in the world. Perspective.
If you think the protesters support tycoons because they oppose the CCP, you ought to reconsider whether those are really opposites.
Already on the international front, China is in trouble. The pro-China KMT party in Taiwan may suffer greatly in the next election because of what's going on in HK now (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3037040/tai...), making China's aggressive demands for forced unification even more unlikely in the medium term. This week, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a HK rights bill (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-usa/us-...) that, if it becomes law, will put China through an annual review, which will further erode the Sino-U.S. relationship for years to come. There have been calls for a boycott of the 2022 Olympics in Beijing which seems fringey now, but won't be if China sends in the troops.
There's also the internal question. Ordinary people in China are getting censored news, but some of the raw information about what's going on is getting through via social media. What does this mean for sentiment in Cantonese speaking areas of southern China, or for areas of China where provincial officials are resented for unjust or unfair treatment of citizens?
China may be the most flagrant (debatable) but they are far from the only instance, and the problems that are haunting Xi now will haunt all of these leaders eventually. Some already are feeling it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21430000
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288038
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20929962
...and so on.
Isn't it ? I mean, I don't respect China much but this is not a false statement.
I want Beijing to have universal suffrage just as much as I want the Cantonese to.
At least SCMP still gives a truthful view: https://yp.scmp.com/hongkongprotests5demands
Obviously if you define "Western media" as newspapers providing a certain viewpoint then by definition your argument would be correct. But that isn't an interesting argument.
Moreover, using the Internet people in the US can read diverse points of view, including e.g. those of pro-China websites. This is not possible in China, except for a small minority who have access to VPN and similar technology.
The majority of American News can be traced back to 6 billionaires
http://www.tiragraffi.it/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/thebig6....
6 is more than one. A majority is not a totality. And not all Western media is American.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsWa9fieWSU
This interview was in Melbourne, Australia. Many of the interviewees were mainland students in Australia.
Not saying your associates and colleagues must be like one of them. Just offering one possible explanation.
You can also test their knowledge, by asking them about the Five Demands of Hong Kong protestors, and also Hong Kong legislative and government structures. Some of the answers can be found in the original article.
Props to China though for having a pretty effective system.
Yeah I don't have any sympathy for him or for the CCP. Appealing to nationalist sentiment to amass political power is making a deal with the devil, and we know how that goes. Let's just hope the US doesn't need to learn this lesson as well.
The sad fact is that when these kinds of authoritarian regimes rise to power, it takes years of abhorrent violence to tear them down. The West naively thought the "free market" would liberalize China (and Russia) and we were very wrong. We're reaping the consequences of that policy mistake on a global scale.
It's the rule of law and human rights that are liberalizing (which careful readers will realize is a tautology). The West needs to stop legitimizing and funding regimes that don't respect these fundamental ideas, and here I'm thinking of China, but also other totalitarian regimes like Saudi Arabia. Furthermore we need to build alliances against these regimes across the world.
We have all heard this idea thrown around now for some time. It’s only in the last few years it seems people have accepted that it wasn’t going to work.
In the context of the trade war and everything lately, I’ve really been thinking about this theory.
On one hand, we know the current reality. An ascendant authoritarian country looking to return to great power status. We have a trade war as a result of years of toxic codependency. It remains to be seen how far the trade war goes and wether or not it is the catalyst for some future war.
Now on the other hand, what direction would China have gone had Nixon not gone to China to open up trade negotiations in the 70s.
It’s impossible to know, but I can imagine quite a number of scenarios that are far worse than a trade war with China. Imagine a North Korea type situation where the country is much larger and influential and does not have such a co dependent trading relationship with the United States.
Is that really a better outcome?
Also important noting that China already had nukes when they began joining international trade in the 70s.
The situation could’ve been much worse.
- The US foreign policy of regime change and bullying hegemony was a complete failure, and totally counterproductive.
- We should have deployed soft power, like aid, diplomacy, and the Peace Corps, to places that were vulnerable to falling into authoritarian rule long term, and invested in the development of poorer countries.
- We should have more seriously considered deploying hard power to places that initially fell into authoritarian rule. I know Cuba was a failure and I know military action has serious consequences (especially for civilians), but compared to authoritarian governments wielding vast nuclear arsenals and ponderous economic weight... it's a tough choice.
- We should internalize that as the US goes, the world tends to follow. Whenever we violate sovereignty, human rights, or our own values and laws, the world takes notice. Like it or not, we're responsible for showing the world how a liberal superpower behaves. We need to take that responsibility seriously.
I'm impressed how you blatantly assume that marching into some foreign country, guns blazing, will magically turn them into a liberal democracy.
I mean, your track record is abysmal. There are exceptions (eg Japan) but generally when the US puts boots on the ground somewhere, the place turns to shit.
It is important to realize that experts believe the NK situation would be totally unsustainable without China.
Ergo, if China were like NK, it wouldn’t last long, because there is no big-brother economy that could support the (disaster) situation.
The free market did not turn either country into an efficient democracy, that's true. It did not improve the tolerance to dissent to Western levels (sadly, not a particularly high mark recently). It did not prevent an authoritarian regime in either country, too.
There's no silver bullet.
If you step back and think about it, if this protest were to happen in the US, with subways burned, shops destroyed, road blocked, for 6 months. What is going to happen? Compare this hypothetical scenario with what happened in Hong Kong.
Where’s the gap? In 2019 we’ve been accustomed to export thinking to other people and import outrage from the cheapest source. And it doesn’t take a dictatorial government to push a narrative.
Both in the US and in China people work in media voluntarily. In neither case they have freedom to publish anything they want, they have to push specific narratives coming from the top. In China narratives come directly from the government, in the US indirectly through the system of "manufacturing consent".
[1] http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/2011-04/13/content_12319455.htm
When the police come in and arrest everyone working for the China Daily in NYC and send them to jail and physically torture them like the CCP did to Simon Cheng or harvest their organs like the CCP did to Falun Gong followers, then you can make your argument. And many people in the US will fight just as hard for the rights of China Daily US Edition as they fight for freedom of speech and universal suffrage in Hong Kong.
Well, it's not hypothetical, we already did it during WWII to Americans of Japanese ethnicity. And newspapers across the US spoke up against this atrocity [1]. Contrast that with China where the newspapers are forced to push the government's narrative, and invariably focus on the terrorism in 2014 that sparked the CCP's disproportional response rather than the barbaric violence perpetrated by the CCP.
The US government has formally apologized for the atrocities in the concentration camps where Japanese-Americans were held, and paid reparations ($42K per camp survivor in current USD). We vowed never to do something so horrible again. But in 2019 China is still playing with mass forced incarceration, and they even have the gall to call it a model for combating violence that other countries should follow. The CCP has replaced the Japanese empire in abusing their own population (but I think some in China are racist and view Uighurs as not part of the Chinese people, just like how Nazi Germany viewed the Jewish people, and how some in US during WW2 viewed Japanese-Americans).
[1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/11/protests-against-in...
I'd argue that's not hypothetical at all, even with Xinjiang the US has by far the highest rate of imprisonment on the planet both of adults and children.
Most are black. Vast majority are not violent crimes.
It's entirely out of step with the rest of the developed world.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/uKLej0KwcfGN583uqvyfQ...
Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics
I've noticed a massive apathy amongst Chinese towards Xinjiang, the vast majority don't care and think they deserve it. Perhaps you have a lot more in common than you think.
Both countries have horrendous records and many from there feel not the slightest bit of shame about it.
There's no genocide going on. Nor is there any British nor US-style response to the Hong Kong terrorists.
Polling the folks in Xinjiang, they found that the culture was repressive, divisive and anti-China. Hence the reeducation due to crazy ideology.
Just like the crazy Falun Gong people, believing they were growing beings in their arms, legs and other parts of their bodies with "Energy Techniques". China's not big on extremists and crazies.
See, the majority of China are pretty innocent people, and can be swayed and sucked in by cults and religions. That's why the government steps on them "with no mercy".
There's a huge difference in between the Nazis and the Chinese. You just refuse to see it because you don't have the background and education for it. Talk to some people who were around in World War II along with those in Afghanistan and see what they have to say about Nazis and Islamic Extremists. Though they might censor it to be politik these days.
China is about Unity, with the head of the family being State. Division isn't welcome. Cults aren't welcome. Religious movements are welcome in designated areas. "House Churches", "Private Priests" and "Private Imams" aren't welcome. Just like homeschooling isn't allowed in Germany these days so the closet Nazis don't have as many places to hide and indoctrinate people. Get over yourself.
If the same protests happened in the US, with a quarter of the population marching peacefully on June 16 (as it did in Hong Kong), the government has to immediately respond to its people’s demands, for otherwise the current government will lose in landslide in the next election. And all the subway burning, shops destruction, etc will be avoided — these events happened at least three months into Hong Kong protests in September, long after the mega march on June 16.
Thank you for pointing out Hong Kong has no genuine democracy, which is directly related to one of the five key demands.
They wouldn't care about losing. It's about response. Our response to riots like this is to declare martial law and send in the law enforcement and troops.
"will be avoided"?? as if they didn't happen.
Hong Kong was never promised democracy nor independence in any agreement with China. It's been talked about, again and again.
If you think that this is what the HK riots have been all about, think again. Poverty, housing, criminality, Canton vs Mandarin, HK vs China -- the British faced this several times and their response was exactly what the US would be, with a large death toll. The government didn't change hands at that point, kiddo.
Check your repetitive narrative and self-delusion when you leave your safe space.
It's not hypocritical because the US has democratic avenues and Hong Kong (and China) doesn't, disruption is their only option.
When Hong Kong has universal free and fare elections I'll think about joining your condemnation.
I'm not sure if that's enough to say trade with China is a good thing.
But it should turn your idea of a very simple answer into a much more complicated picture.
One nitpick: Hong Kong has its own legal definition of "rioting". It's from the Public Order Ordinance[1], and carries a maximum 10 years jail sentence. The entire law itself is quite draconian and was struck down in the final days of British rule, but was reinstated immediately after the handover.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Order_Ordinance
https://qz.com/1110266/two-years-later-the-last-of-the-vanis...
Actually, the cynic in me thinks that this was by design. By reinforcing the power of the communist party, american corporations wouldn't have to worry about the chinese workers fighting for better labor and environmental conditions, thus keeping costs low.
Uh. His goals were to further American interests in Cold War geopolitics and increase his personal stature as a statesman. Friendly American relations with Chinese Communists put more pressure on Soviet Communists.
Free trade has nothing to due with it. You're forgetting that Nixon went to China in 1972, but the Chinese economy didn't start opening up until 1978 under Deng (and long after Nixon).
But this post grossly underestimates the short term economic effects that cutting trade ties with China would have. Companies would go bankrupt. It is quite likely that the US and possibly the world would enter a recession or depression. These events will have devastating effects on people around the world far beyond the 1%.
We are part of a world economy. We are dependent on China and China is dependent on us.
Surely there are better ways to effect change in China than waging economic war. War of any kind will cause suffering.
I disagree with the premise that starting an economic war is the right way to get China to change its policies.
As a US citizen, I try to consider how the rest of the world may view our actions (glass houses and all). Following the logic here it would make sense for the rest of the world to cutoff trade with the United States due to the Iraq war, which has caused many civilian deaths.
But if you agree that the rest of the world should have sanctioned the US for the Iraq war (among other things) then there might be a consistency with trying to sanction China.
So even though the US has absolutely no moral high ground - I still think that it is important for individual Americans to take a stand against atrocities around the world. I don't think we can discredit Drew's post based on the fact that the US government is just as (or more) evil than the Chinese government.
I do think that special care needs to be taken to avoid the hypocrisy and call out US atrocities as they happen - but calling out the Chinese crimes is very important in the current global climate.
Should it support popular coups (that promise elections as soon as they take over) or dictatorships?
Sitting here in a former eastern block country I completely disagree. It is absolutely obvious that communism is by far humanity's greatest moral failure and China just proves it again.
United States would need need to start dropping nukes on cities to even approach communism's death toll. A regime change, however misguided, here and there won't be enough for centuries.
This post is much the same way. A poorer China is only going to deteriorate their human rights. A wealthier China is going to crave for more freedom. This happened in South Korea, which many forget used to be a brutal military dictatorship.
They never knew, if lying by omission is a crime, all media is guilty of it.
We've been testing that theory for decades with negative results.
Maybe it works other places, but it doesn't seem to be working in China.
For instance, if China's economic influence is stifling free speech in the west, that's a pretty disturbing trend.
If its actually free speech you care about.
I think collapse of the current government is more likely than a peaceful ROC-esque (Taiwan) transition from dictatorship to democracy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_28_incident [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
This was the lie told to the American people in the 90s to justify PNTR with the PRC. We know it was a bald-faced lie now. Why are you saying this?
The fact that I, a non-citizen can live in US and call out its mass killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan denotes the difference between US and China.
Its seems to be a very recent American phenomenon.
Where I live it is shameful and very damaging to one's credibility to be exposed for maintaining double standards.
Comparing the two is just an excuse to do nothing.
In the meantime, feel free (pun intended) to protest misdeeds by the U.S., vote for new leaders, organize with like-minded individuals, or buy weapons.
(Aside: many people feel like buying weapons is completely futile against oppression. But it reduces your dependence on the government for protection, and makes it harder for the federal government to convince local police to carry out their dirty work. Also, really bad governments never seem to want citizens to be armed, so perhaps there's a reason for that.)
"We are not perfect, but we can't stand by. We have sins of our own that we are trying to rectify, but we cannot allow what you're doing."
The flaw in mutual criticism without admission of guilt is that saying "we're good" even in comparison is so obviously self-serving that it gives your opponent a trivial excuse to dismiss you.