Why China is winning the trade war

There is always a way out and Europe is starting from an advanced spot. Japan went from a isolated medieval country with very little resources except for people and became an industrial power in 40 years.

The past 50 years of American economic policy has basically been "look how much money we can make if every other country acts against its own interests indefinitely".

People can be trained, legal obstacles can be removed and yeah it'll be expensive if they choose to do it.

That said if Putin went completely off the deep end and invaded eastern Europe you'd be amazed how fast planning laws on building stuff went out the window - Democratic governments can move fast when they have to but tend towards inaction when they don't.

It's also quite entertaining to just write off Western Europe based on resource availability - China itself is quite poor on natural resources (which is why they've played the long game in Africa so well, they get resources and build a market to sell manufactured goods to at the same time - it's been masterful realpolitik from them).

The trick is to not treat it like a zero sum game and to realise that to live a middle class life in America/Europe is to live life of luxury that almost nobody in human history could ever have dreamed of.

Very hard but not impossible.

China is the idea-mine for western services these days too.

I for one enjoy my cushy white collared job and breathing air with little pollution. China has it's own very difficult problems that they have to deal with. Consumer demand is low for their economy, their birth rate is even lower than Japan's, and the finances of a lot of local governments are held together by some very opaque threads.

> it put too many legal obstacles regarding ecology,

The biggest problem isn't ecology. It is labor regulation.

One example: Apple handled all its manufacturing to FoxCon because workers committing suicide in their factories is a FoxCon's problem hidden in Shenzhen, it isn't Apple's problem.

Another example: you can't have German companies starting huge projects because in Germany you just can't do the massive firings that Microsoft, Meta and AWS do when these projects fail.

And the list goes on to infrastructure and land rights. Building a pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, passing through farm land? Even Republicans would get scared of that.

The truth is that building physical stuff is very hard on the people that do it and sometimes even dangerous.

Unfortunately brexit meant that a hell of a lot of people behind the scenes scrambled to keep life running as usual, so that brexiteers could just say "See? Everything's fine"

Unfortunately it will lead to further manipulation, as nobody can accept it's their fault. The world is in terrible shape.

Did they really vote for that? I'm not American but have been quite surprised by the ever changing Trump tariff lottery. Brexit on the other hand was kind of predictable.

We have been assured that short-term pain will turn into long-term gain. Unfortunately, politicians never play the long game; only the citizenry does, by force.

Pretty much - the US spends more on it's military than the next 9 countries combined where the Chinese produce more than the next 9 countries combined.

So if the US is a military superpower then China is a manufacturing superpower.

Anyone who knows history knows how dangerous it is to fight someone who can out produce you even if you start with a military advantage (WWII - Japan and US, Yamamato knew it well)

> "In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success" - Yamamato.

If the US had continued business as usual they could have divided the world between them but they seem determined to burn every possible bridge they can and live in splendid isolation - which is great except if you are running a massive imbalance on physical goods...

China doesn't really have to do anything to "win" on the international stage - when your enemy is making a mistake don't interrupt him applies and they have their own issues at home.

The US can make stuff, and up until Trump took office it was going through the most massive expansions of factory capacity it has seen since the post WW2 boom.

However this year seems to be trying to cancel all those big wins. We do have chip manufacturing, but since most of the battery, solar panel, and EV factories went into largely Trump-voting areas, they are all at risk since they are politically disfavored technologies.

With plentiful energy and a scalable supply chain it would be easy to recover using robots and AI. But the West's leadership has been destroying both for decades. And I mean both sides in most Western countries (Republicans/Democrats, Tories/Labour, etc).

"Madness. Madness and stupidity."

PRC roboticizing more than RoW combined to PLUG bluecollar workforce gap, they're already short on manufacturing labour supply. Well rather kids don't want to assemble widgets. The goal is always to maintain current industrial base with fraction of headcount from demographic contraction, and by "100s millions" out of work, we're really talking about 10s of millions going to retirement and hopefully robots can keep the machine brrrting to replace productivity and drive down costs so system can caretake 10sm retirees with cheap goods - PRC manufacturing sector already down to like 120m from 250m high in 200s. Another 20m in next decade is easily absorbable. PRC just trying to keeping things steady, bad things are going to happen to every one else when they realize they don't have PRC industrial chains to replicate affordable abundance. It's going to extra screw developing economies now labour saving tech + US shifting away from global consumer via tariffs going to kill export-led model dead, and there really isn't another model on the horizon to replace it. VS west PRC going to weather fine at least longer for the simple reason they have stupid high household savings rate, this isn't leveraged US households living paycheck to paycheck that will lead to different tier of instability.

Lots of unemployed young males is a preindicator for war. Governments sometimes fear losing control and so will start a war to kill off the young males.

Yes people were complaining in the late 1990s about large plants being bought by the Chinese and then the Clinton administration allowing 20k visas for the Chinese workers to take the plant apart and ship it to China.

Oh, it's worse than that. The companies who moved production overseas are the ones who taught them the advanced manufacturing technologies necessary to make the now offshorn products (looking at you, Apple).

While being able to walk into a Walmart and buy a microwave for $20 is good for 'society' its not so good if you want to onshore microwave production and have to compete against these 'Everyday Low Prices' coming in from overseas.

One global hegemon is bad enough, then we'd have two!

But actually it will be embarrassing when China puts an end to the "freedom of navigation" of all those US Navy ships circling their borders.

China is clearly aiming to take over Taiwan, and if they can't do it peacefully they are building up a military that can do it. America should be afraid of that.

China clearly support Russia in their war on Ukraine despite pretending neutrality. Europe should be afraid.

China is doing lots of other geopolitical things that you should be afraid draws you in.

The day the US isn't the top economy, the status of the dollar is threatened and that's the top reason why the US is where it is in the first place.

> What is America so afraid of?

Everything. The whole empire exists on the basis of exploitation, and existence of enemies. The US military industrial complex has immense power, and it needs a reason to exist, and keep existing.