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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>They undermine it every day they refuse to allow free trade. The US and others spent a lot of resources building the free trade system of the world...

I.e. the kind of trade that they dictate and call "free", creating banana republics that cut them special deals, toppling governments when they don't like their decisions, using humanitarian and development funding (even from supposedly independent sources, like the IMF) as bribes and pressure to secure special treatment , insisting on the dollar being used in major trade as opposed to the euro or the yuan (and punishing those states that make the opposite "free" decision), getting their hands on oil producing countries, and so on.

And of course using protectionism whenever they like for themselves ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St... ).

Some free trade...

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The US does this, but I'm glad it's a country where we value being able to openly criticize our government for it.

We have an independent judiciary, democratic institutions--what are structural Separations of Powers which is the most important structure of a civilization consistent with liberty.

China doesn't have that. Saying the US also cheats the rules, too, is important, but shouldn't be confused with the reality that China does it much more abhorrently.

> The US does this, but I'm glad it's a country where we value being able to openly criticize our government for it.

Around half of your population don't seem to want that at all as long as 'their guy' is in power.

The US has many problems, but there's a big difference between people being unhappy with you and being send into "reeducation camps" if the government doesn't like what you say.

There's also a major difference between being sent to reeducation camps and being killed by a drone strike. The US may tolerate dissent inside their borders better, but far worse overall.

Not sure re-education camp is a step up from drone strike. Depends on your priorities I suppose.

If you prefer death to a reeducation camp, that choice is likely available to you. The dead have no choice.

Yeah, sure and how is that Huawei ended up being banned without due process? Europeans are not sparred either using the Justice Department or a straight out tariff(i.e steel, cars etc)

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/ax5hwm/economic_war...

True. And every US company is by default basically banned from China unless they want to let you in.

Nobody said it was a perfect system. It can be abused, especially when legal precedents haven't been set, but there are also means to challenge the legitimacy of such decisions.

>> but there are also means to challenge the legitimacy of such decisions.

And how did that work? (i.e for the Iraq invasion/Afganistan).

"international law matters only when it is aligned with US national interests"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/15/mike-pompeo-...

Rhetoric- and you believe it! Don’t you know where those slogans come from? Well-paid researchers - how do you say it? - "think tanks," funded by big businesses. What is that? A "think tank"?

China is the last sovereign country in the world. Authoritarian but willing - unlike U.N.-governed countries - to give its people the freedom to do what they want. The West, so afraid of strong government, now has no government. Only financial power.

Our governments have limited power by design.

I spill my drink!

What does that have to do with free trade and the actions around it?

I mean a Chinese person can say that they are glad to live in a country that does not invade other countries, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Tibet? Treatment of Muslims in the country?

It’s not to the extent of the US but China did invade other countries in the past. Vietnamese people sure want to have some words with you.

While separation of powers is a great thing for protection of human rights, it doesn't change anything for international treaties. No matter whether country is democratic or not, they will try to push terms that are beneficial to them rather than to other countries.

The government goes to war\implements policy 1. People criticize.

The government continues war\policy 1. People continue criticizing.

The government starts war\implements policy 2. People criticize.

The government continues war\policy 1 and war\policy 2. People continue criticizing.

...

Forward slash (/) is punctuation in English. Back slash is not.

My eyes have been seeing a lot of Windows local file paths lately. Nothing that a couple of days of Linux\FreeBSD cannot cure.

Really? We are currently disengaging in Syria. We left Iraq. If people had cared that much about leaving earlier, we would have left earlier because they would have made it an important issue of a campaign. A couple people criticizing it do not change policy. This is the flaw of the tyranny of the majority, which is why we are set up to allow more power to state and local governments.

Of course, Iran is now threatening free trade through the straits of hormuz. Would you call intervention to protect free passage "toppling foreign governments" because they "make decisions we don't like"?

>> If people had cared that much about leaving earlier...

It really does not matter. US of A could never prove the existence of WMD in Iraq. In fact, all of their claims have been proven to be wrong. Millions dead. People who started the war are enjoying retirement sipping on the costliest wines.

I think you raise a lot of valid points, the US is hardly innocent on a historic global basis.

That being said, what's your take on China's behavior specifically, do you believe they are acting in a "fair" manner? Do you believe the advantages they enjoy are all justified? (Note: for the sake of this argument only, karmic payback for US historic behavior is not considered a valid justification.)

EDIT: I'm curious why explicitly acknowledging valid points but then asking a clear and specific question (that excludes these points as they are not directly relevant to current trade with China) is being downvoted? Downvotes for disagreement are appropriate according to HN guidelines (or they used to be), but I'm not asserting anything, I am literally asking a serious question.

I have found criticism of China gets downvotes without a lot of responding comments.

Toxic (in this case racist) behavior like this is starting to become common enough that I wish mods would step in with a friendly reminder.

For the last time, it's not racist to question a Nation's decisions just because they have a homogeneous population. Holy hell.

I was referring to the motivation of the downvoters. I would be happy to consider any valid motivations you could raise for downvoting a question (for clarity: a question is generally not an assertion, this one certainly wasn't.)

>That being said, what's your take on China's behavior specifically, do you believe they are acting in a "fair" manner?

Regarding trade: I think China (and any country) should have absolute say in how they do business, and who they want to do business with, who to allow in their internal market, etc.

And of course other countries should be free to reciprocate. That would be actually free trade in my book: with any nation being free to do business as it pleases (trade this, impose tariffs on that, etc).

The current "free trade" is mere lip service in the sense: "we promote free trade to force others to open their markets to us, but we ourselves use tariffs, wars, and whenever we like to further our interests". So, I don't like it, and I also don't like the "totally free" trade (which I find a pipe dream, as big players wil always work their way around it).

>Do you believe the advantages they enjoy are all justified? (Note: for the sake of this argument only, karmic payback for US historic behavior is not considered a valid justification.)

I think "fair" can only be considered in context. Something is fair or not according to how the actual players play the game, not according to some abstract rules. If everybody cheats, China is fair to cheat too. In that case, I don't think the "karmic payback" is irrelevant to answer the question, nor I believe it's mere US "historic behavior" (if the latter implies something that happened only in the distant past and is not active behavior it's benefiting from at the moment).

Regarding human rights: China is authoritarian (and on the fore-front of authoritarian abuse of technology). That said, the situation is accepted well by the vast majority of its population, who doesn't have much tradition of free elections in the first place, and who probably worries of the impact of a breakdown of the regime.

Naive pundits might call for the immediate dissolution of the CCP for example, but in 1.6 billion people state a power vacuum could lead to chaos, schism, and civil war than makes India/Pakistan, or modern day Iraq/Libya etc look like Disney movies. In any case, it's up to them, not to outsiders to call their shots (or to take sides in their internal power struggles). All kinds of countries had their popular revolutions, reforms, etc, if China (as a nation) doesn't like its regime, they're welcome to change it.

Free trade is like free markets. I can buy shares of nearly any public company in the world (notably, not including China). I can move my stuff for free (besides shipping cost) to many countries. That is free trade and free markets.

China has neither. Free is free as in no restriction, not free to do whatever you want.

Free to do whatever will make global trade more difficult for everyone as all countries will have tariffs, as it was historically.

>Free is free as in no restriction, not free to do whatever you want.

Well, the term (and its proponents) should not hijack the concept of freedom them. One could call it "open" (or sometimes "forcefully open" market, e.g. like when the British waged war on China so that they are free to sell opium there).

Free as in freedom should include the freedom not to trade.

>China has neither

Well, despite that is one of the biggest importers and exporters of the world, and they've been rising from an agrarian economy to the worlds top manufacturer, and being in the top-2 global players. So looks to be working for them.

>Free to do whatever will make global trade more difficult for everyone as all countries will have tariffs, as it was historically.

That's a good thing in my book. We need less global trade, if not for anything else, for environmental reasons (the "reduce" part of the reduce, reuse, recycle).

If the people in some country feel as if they benefit from trading something, they can always choose to trade it. But if they have negative consequences from trading, i.e. importing or exporting X, then why should they continue to do so and suffer them?

I'm on the fence about "free trade". It helps globalization and probably the human race to technologically advance as a whole, but harms a ton of local industry.

I also agree that open trade is a better name

Referring to the top half:

This answer seems to pretend the prisoner's dilemma doesn't exist.

The world grows more when it works together. If China doesn't want to play by the rules of the global trading system, it should stop reaping the benefits while undermining it for everyone else.

> Regarding trade: I think China (and any country) should have absolute say in how they do business, and who they want to do business with, who to allow in their internal market, etc.

I don't necessarily disagree, except:

- does this take into consideration explicit agreements they've signed with the WTO?

- if this behavior is perfectly fine, why the extreme reluctance (on both sides, at least until recently) to acknowledge specifics of how the game is actually being played?

> I think "fair" can only be considered in context. Something is fair or not according to how the actual players play the game, not according to some abstract rules. If everybody cheats, China is fair to cheat too.

That seems perfectly reasonable, but my question was: is the US "cheating" China? Are de-facto terms and actual actions (actual actions, so excluding "karma"-based justification) of trade between the US and China "fair", or are they not fair? As far as I can tell, that question remains unanswered.

> Naive pundits...

I absolutely agree on a philosophical basis, but unless I'm mistaken, this seems orthogonal to my specific question. For the sake of clarity and conversational efficiency, I'd rather we not add new topics of discussion to this particular sub-thread.

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