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Comment by koheripbal | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of dishonesty around Westerners complaining about foreign cheap labor.

They claim to be championing labor rights, but they are often just angered at companies for stopping all manufacturing in the West. They see it as an obvious weakness in their ideology that companies can just walk away from their labor movement and go elsewhere.

The obvious truth, and what literally all of these Vietnamese workers will tell you, is that foreign tech manufacturing is an amazingly better paying job than what is currently available.

The true story with China is that moving Western manufacturing to China raised the standard of living for literally hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty.

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> There is a lot of dishonesty around Westerners complaining about foreign cheap labor.

This is a strawman.

You're conflating different groups of people with different interests. Some people complain about labor conditions, some people complain that jobs are leaving the country. Almost nobody is "dishonest" about this.

There are plenty of people who are extremely selective with regards to their outrage on each issue, though.

So? Most people's entire existence is predicated on unsustainable consumerism. There is literally too much to care about. If you require that people must care about all issues to care about any issue, then progress won't be made. Maybe that's your intention.

I don’t require everyone to care the same about all issues, that wasn’t my point.

My point was people who care about labor rights, shipping jobs offshore, etc are selective about those specific issues. Never said they had to care about other issues.

The same type of argument can be made about any specific issue. For instance, labor rights is incredibly broad. I don't think it's a realistic requirement for someone to care about every possible labor-rights issue. It's fine if people want to be selective.

I wasn’t specific enough.

My point was that people are inconsistent due to the intersection between their advocacy and their own sense of nationalism. The issues are amplified when they pertain to Americas enemies and lessened when it pertains to Americas Allies.

Maybe to help explain what I think you are getting at. A year or two ago, you had senators preaching about how we needed to stop china's slave labor of the uighyurs. Okay, fine, I agree with that. But what about the horrible labor practices American companies rely on in central Africa where there, slavery also exists? The people who say bad China about labor practices have their blinders up to our allies who use the same labor practices. The reality is, if you think a company should not use slave labor in China, you should also thing they shouldnt use slave labor in Africa or Vietnam or any other emerging country/economy/third world country.

For a specific example, I did a quick search and Malaysia is one. Malaysia has the same or worst labor practices then China, but no one complains about tech companies relying on Malaysia's poor labor practices.

A blog post that talks about it. https://medium.com/swlh/forced-labor-in-tech-c91daf979201

So your point is that you can’t call out an instance of slavery unless you call them all out? That doesn’t make sense to me. You should be able to highlight an issue without someone retorting “what about X?”, which is literal whataboutism.

Everybody is a hypocrite on almost every issue. Take a major issue like climate change. Almost every human in the U.S. and Europe has massively large carbon footprints. Does that mean Americans or Europeans can’t care about climate change? We’re not ideal beings working in an ideal system. We’re flawed being in a flawed system trying to make things a little better.

Again, the point was never that you have to be perfect, it’s that it’s shouldn’t just happen to perfectly align with Americas foreign policy agenda.

Why is it not ok to align with American foreign policy? I guess you’re implying that Americans are ok benefiting from other forms of labor exploitation? Why does that matter? Going back to the climate change example: everyone benefits from GHG emissions. Allowing arguments to be derailed by “NO U” is a quick way to stifle all discussion.

To me, your argument, fully constructed, is: “you can’t care that Uyghur’s are enslaved because America also uses slave labor and American foreign policy is anti-China.” How is that an argument?

Not necessarily. If someone only knows about the case of the uighurys, buts not the case of Malaysia, you can't hold someone against that. However, once the issue is raised and they are made aware, if they still only care about the uighurys, then it is targeted for a reason. We are all only as good as our information is and none of us know everything. The issue with the senators is, when they started that campaign, a bunch of information dropped about those same practices elsewhere they they definitely had access to and still refused to acknowledge it. Instead, they created an extremely target bill specifically at China. Maybe I am just an ass because I expect our representatives to be a little more thorough than the average citizen, especially when they are the ones drafting legislation. I and other average citizens don't have access to the wealth of information and resources our representatives to. So I expect them to use. I don't have the power to subpoena people to answer questions before congress, they do.

But no, Jim Bob isn't a hypocrite if the information was never brought before him. Jim Bob does become a hypocrite when the information is in front of him and refuses to acknowledge it.

>But what about the horrible labor practices American companies rely on in central Africa

Also the slave labor in US itself, https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...

That's the same thing. It's just an arbitrary line in the sand you have drawn where you say if care about these issues but not these you must be dishonest.

It’s not the same thing, if you only care about these issues when they are related to Americas enemies (eg China, Iran, etc), then you are inconsistent.

Welcome to humanity where everyone is inconsistent. It's part of the fallibility of humans.

Everybody is. Unless there is someone outraged all the time.

Our scarcest commodity is attention.

The people complaining on Twitter that foreign cheap labour is being used are writing on devices that were produced by that same labour. Those very same people are the ones that are demanding that we bring those labour back but unwilling to brunt the cost that companies will then pass on to those same customer. It's not a strawman its the reality of Western society, whatever feels wrong is totally and completely detached from any logic or intellectual discussion about why the reality they feel like they are entitled to is at conflict with their own contradictory desires.

It is virtue signaling, largely to placate and pat themselves on the back to deflect blame from them, that their consumption, their vote with their money, and unwillingness to pay the true cost, is what creates this situation.

> but unwilling to brunt the cost that companies will then pass on to those same customer

HUGE "citation needed" here. Apple did a study years ago (when Obama was President) and the cost to manufacture iPhones in the US was well under 10% of the total cost, by their own calculations.

The cost of labor in China has only gotten worse since then (hence the move to Vietnam in the OP).

> years ago

No longer the case obviously but more importantly, Apple studied themselves and found they were only saving 10% in costs? This makes no sense lol

10% is many billions every three months. I don't think it's wise or ethical to manufacture in countries that have human rights violations but there's nothing ethical about a corporation.

Where do you propose that Apple move their Texas plant then?

(The US, like China, also runs concentration camps. As far as I can tell there is no country on Earth that uniformly preserves human rights.)

That quip was over cost of labour specifically. The broader point was US no longer had the manufacturing base or expertise pool to manufacture advanced Apple products at scale or timelines of modern release cycles at all, i.e. Cooks observation that PRC had enough tooling engineers to fill multiple stadiums vs US a room. The entire point was that cheap labour wasn't what was keeping Apple in manufacturing in PRC.

99% chance the people complaining about labor conditions are doing so on a made in China phone.

Let’s be honest, people complaining about labor conditions have a pretty weak understanding of economics and what is actually going on with regards to these factories. China isn’t stupid. They weaken their currency specifically to bring in the cheap labor jobs to lift the poorest to a slightly less poor tier. Unless you realize how poor they started out with it’s hard to appreciate the gains in wealth even if it still looks dirt poor to an armchair labor rights activist.

> 99% chance the people complaining about labor conditions are doing so on a made in China phone.

99% of everyone has a phone made in China, does this mean it's not possible to complain about the state of the world we live in?

Not while you are literally voting with your dollars to preserve that status quo.

Especially when said iPhone assemblers aren't even complaining about their work conditions as much as some clueless American... if one is going to complain, complain about one's own conditions, or something one actually knows about...

It's not a vote if there is practically only one option.

> have a weak understanding of economics

Economists hardly understand the economy, so I’d say they’re in good company…

Jokes aside, demanding better treatment of workers and onshoring of jobs doesn’t seem as insane as people here are making it seem? This whole thread feels kind of irrelevant.

>99% chance the people complaining about labor conditions are doing so on a made in China phone.

Is there any other option?

Don't stop people from complaining about lead in the water supply, just because they have nothing else to drink.

I'd be willing to bet that many who complain about "labor conditions" being too poor would still rather preserve a $200 discount on their phone instead. But having come from poverty, most people complaining about labor conditions on behalf of poor people have never experienced poverty themselves. It's possible for a capitalist society to have actors that willfully exploit people, but it is not the default that simply employing the poorest people equates to exploitation. People are just whiny that jobs are being lost to someone poorer.

I think you can get a Fairphone in some parts of the world (Europe). But it's not a particularly viable option in the USA.

This kind of reminds me of the plot of The Good Place [spoiler warning] -- in the show it's essentially impossible to get to Heaven because every decision you make has transitive dependencies on awful labor practices, abusive behaviors, and other unseemly things. So everyone ends up in Hell.

I don't think using a smartphone built with evil labor practices is inherently evil. But buying one every year when you could use one for 5 years is probably a bit evil.

A few thoughts:

-I knew someone who wanted to set up optical and circuit board manufacturing in Vietnam - the few factories they toured seemed to be set up very well. Also frequently with better female/male ratios in management levels (perhaps bc, at least what they were told, Vietnamese culture tends to be more matriarchal than elsewhere). Maybe why also a lot of Japanese electronic makers (Pentax, Nikon) had a bigger presence in Vietnam than expected

-the irony of Western manufacturing and standards of living - (coupled w/ strong policy and incentive support from the ccp) is that Xi Jinping seems to be actively going against perhaps one of the greatest economic partnership of recent times, namely USA/China. I think that is why there is likely going to be a contraction in the Chinese economy, if not already happen due to Zero Covid. If anything brings down the emperor/dynasty this time, it is because the grain ceases to flow (at least borrowing a phrase from an undergraduate Chinese history class...)

China's economy is in trouble. They've had a few property developers running Ponzi schemes and it's led to small bank runs. The government is propping things up and have massive reserves but it's not a good sign.

If you want to decrease inequality, it would make sense for people to be compensated for reducing inequality. This is what exactly what outsourcing is.

Outsourcing has dramatically increased inequality in the United States.

Try again.

Why should we have to care about American workers over everyone else? On one side, you have a American factory worker loses the ability to buy steak. On the other, a Vietnamese worker gets access to running water, the consumer gets cheaper electronics and Apple shareholders get extra profits.

The Vietnamese workers already had access to running water.

Source: I actually live in Vietnam.

In cities, sure, but much of Vietnam still lives in rural areas, which still are very underserved. The continued industrialization of Vietnam is indeed enabling more access running water.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_...

Who do you think is the we here? Because usually the we that is complaining about it are those American factory workers.

I'd say it a little more complicated then that when it comes to analyzing the American worker. You have the American worker, who has a high standard of living because the cost of goods are driven down by the fact that the Vietnamese worker gets access to running water. This is just to use your terminology/example. The reality is its not access to running water, but a job that will higher their standard of living. The American worker wants the to buy the 72 in TV, but also wants to have the job to make the 72 in TV and the only way he can afford the 72 in TV is if it is made in Vietnam.

Inequality just means the rich got richer faster than the poor got richer.

The poor's increase in wealth still outpaced inflation.

...and given that the poorest in poor countries had their wealth skyrocket out of poverty, outsourcing has absolutely been a win-win.

Depends whether you include costs for healthcare, education and housing.

> The true story with China is that moving Western manufacturing to China raised the standard of living for literally hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty.

And thereby strengthened the hand of the CCP.

It's exactly the opposite.

People who can afford a good education are harder to control.

Yes, that's why American people are so dumbed down nowadays, intentionally by some people who happened to share this ideology.

No it isn't. People with nothing to lose and living in poverty while seeing their democratic neighbors prospering are harder to control. People with education, jobs, and families - something to lose - are easier to control. How many Tienanmen Squares has China had since Asian and Western democracies opened their markets and enriched China.

This is literally ahistorical. The overwhelming majority of consequential protests/rebellions/revolutions were heavily endorsed by the literati class. Why do you think freedom of speech and expanding education are classically liberal claims?

You can see it right now in Putin's Russia. Opposition to the regime, to the extent that it exists, does not come from the proles.

No, you are exactly backwards. Did the People’s Revolution win or did the students win? I seem to remember that the students were run over by tanks. Probably not being driven by highly educated PLA commanders.

You just destroyed the argument you were trying to make.

The protesters were the well educated students. This will always be the tip of the spear for change.

Revolutions that try to leverage the uneducated masses are the most bloody and destructive - and they usually lead to dictatorships, not democracies.

They all leverage the masses. That’s the whole point. Otherwise it’s just a coup.

Tiananmen protesters were mostly students, young people with a lot of prospects in life, usually from a better-off families who could afford to send children to a university (instead of having them work and keep up the family).

They definitely had much more to lose than Marx's lumpen proletariat.

Of course, now people in China, especially in the rich coastal cities, have dramatically more to lose. They've been shown though that they would be allowed to prosper, as long as they do not try to disobey or even express doubt about CCP's rule. So it's pretty easy for them to convince themselves that CCP's policy is fine enough and not worth protesting against.

> mostly students

Aka nothing to lose. Having family and job would be considered having things to lose. Also let’s not consider students “educated”, they will be if they then build a career and actually practice their knowledge. Any clown can get a degree.

Fun fact: due to the small labor market for terrorists and education spurring political interests, terrorists are disproportionally well-educated men from upper class families. Essentially, they're very intense lobbyists.

Citation: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177823/wh...

Even if this is the case, do you honestly not think the tradeoff is worth it? Lifting a billion people out of crushing poverty seems worth it even if it came at the cost of giving a dictatorship stronger geopolitical influence.

An authoritarian, nuclear armed government that is bent on expansionism by flaunting the established global rule of law and that is likely to start a world war over Taiwan? No, I don't think that's a worthwhile tradeoff.

I don’t think it’s accurate to say they are bent on expansion, but whether it’s worth it is more up to those 1 billion people to decide their fate and tradeoffs rather than foreign intervention. Oh and, due to China’s history of negative foreign interventions I doubt the population will take kindly to it now.

talking about the US?

China has been nuclear armed since the 1960s. That wasn't a product of the country's industrialization or trade with the West.

Somebody needs to dispel the myth that "outside of liberalism/west there will be no prosperity"

That's true, foreign company, from tech company to manufacture company, all of them provides more friendly working environment than China local companies. The workers in Shanghai Tesla work 12 hours a day, and paid less than 1500$ a month, which might be unacceptable for western labors, but even this is much better than other local car manufacture companies.

> They see it as an obvious weakness in their ideology that companies can just walk away from their labor movement and go elsewhere.

it's true! we can't force anybody to use our labor. but we can control access to our markets.

you don't have to be a union activist to recognize that exporting american manufacturing jobs has been disastrous for our domestic working class.

> you don't have to be a union activist to recognize that exporting american manufacturing jobs has been disastrous for our domestic working class

You do though. The reality is that "exporting" these jobs means cheaper products for everyone, and no one in what you call the "working class" wants these jobs to be in the US if it means they need to pay more for everything.

The US consistently manufactures more every year despite hiring fewer manufacturing workers because improved automation competes with US labor at lower costs.

>no one in what you call the "working class" wants these jobs to be in the US

you might be a little disconnected from reality

>if it means they need to pay more for everything.

yes, now they can pay a little less from their wage.. oh wait, they got fired

> you might be a little disconnected from reality

you might be projecting

> yes, now they can pay a little less from their wage.. oh wait, they got fired

nah, there are plenty of "working class" people who are working

> and no one in what you call the "working class" wants these jobs to be in the US if it means they need to pay more for everything.

look at a graph of productivity measures since 1990, a graph of real wages, and a graph of US GINI scores. i'm a knowledge economy worker like most people here, but we have been on a course of serious class warfare and economic cannibalism for decades. but thank you for letting us know that everybody actually wants it this way.

as a Vietnamese, we just laugh when we read about those things, so out of touch with reality. It's very condescending as well, the logic is that developing countries are stupid so whatever deal they negotiate for themself must be at a disadvantage and bad for them. When I read criticism of China in Africa I could not help but asking myself, if these developed countries care so much why don't they invest in Africa so that Africa has choices other than China? The fact is China (and Vietnam mind you) are the very few countries willing to invest in Africa at their own risk. I would not be surprised if one day it's "communist Vietnam"'s turn to be the scapegoat.

Funniest thing is that in the past Westerners were laughing at China for choosing manufacturing while glorifying their so called service economy. Now they are simping over manufacturing jobs.

> I would not be surprised if one day it's "communist Vietnam"'s turn to be the scapegoat.

Not even "vibrant democratic India" got spared

Assembly plants are just one kind of manufacturing, albeit a very visible part. Petroleum refining and other chemicals are manufacturing. The US does a lot of that.

Manufacturing has been a growing share of GDP for the past few years, interrupted surprisingly briefly by COVID. Just that most of it isn't assembly lines.

I submitted a thoughtful analysis of this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32214320

I can hire a person here (UK) to do something for £x/hour or £y/unit. I can perhaps hire a person in say Vietnam to do something for £x/n/hour etc.

I don't do this personally but we should explore the possibilities.

The thing about capitalism is it is capitalism. You should drive costs down and profits up. Ideally you don't kill people on the "journey" but hey that's what laws n that jud, errr judiciary ... ... cops/police thing is all about or something.

I own a very small company in the UK. We don't go full on capitalism (whatever that monster really is) We strive to be able to sleep at night.

NZ is where you want to hire remote staff. Our wages are low and so is our dollar. We speak the same language and have a very similar culture. The time zone is an issue but remote workers normally will do strange hours to make it work. The more people do that the better life gets here in NZ so I'm a big fan. Our exports are mainly agricultural and tourism. Neither are high earners.

Sounds like expensive version of the Philippines :)

Yeah, unfortunately this is true. Even Vietnam is usually pretty easy to deal with. Still go NZ.

95% of Vietnamese support capitalism: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/03/13/vietnam-... thus making it the most capitalist country in the world...

Second in line is Bangladesh

P.S. USA had a capitalism approval around 70% in the same survey.

When I cam to Canada from the USSR in the beginning of 90s people at place where I worked were telling me that I am more of a capitalist that they were.

They won the war. Just took Americans awhile to accept that.

Huh? That’s doesn’t follow. Plus when they won they went full Communist.

That survey's execution is questionable

https://twitter.com/LunaOi_VN/status/1485985258302742528

But now we can't build anything and if china embargoes us, we're doomed.

We produce things that matter, such as food. We’ll be fine.

With no chips to repair the john deere tractors? Yeah food won't happen.

We produce lots of chips now, and soon we're going to be producing enough for ourselves.

If that were true USA wouldn't care about Taiwan.

There are multiple fabs in the US.

> But now we can't build anything and if china embargoes us, we're doomed.

Firstly there is vastly more manufacturing in the US, Canada, and Mexico than you appear to realize. Secondly China is far more prone to being embargoed than the United States. If China cut us off then the price of certain goods would increase significantly and there’d be shortages of some goods and industrial inputs but we could feed ourselves, keep the lights on, heat/cool our homes, keep our industry going, and crucially our military capacity would be untouched. China would lose its largest and demographically healthiest consumer market which would vastly deepen its economic hole, lose a huge supplier of food which China can’t do without, and the US navy could interdict all energy shipments to China which would result in the country deindustrializing in a few months after its reserves ran out. Depending on how the embargo was effected it might drag in Japan or India both whose navies could single-handedly cut off China from oil shipments.

This is assuming that China's rapidly evolving navy cannot do anything about these blockades. They have massive shipbuilding capacity and currently the most advanced destroyer (type 055) in the world.

> They have massive shipbuilding capacity and currently the most advanced destroyer

The vast majority of their navy and ship building capacity is coastal. Their blue water navy is still minuscule and the challenge isn’t just manufacturing but experienced personnel which is decidedly harder to quickly scale up and is not aided by their terminal demographics.

>prone to being embargoed

Most US / global industries wouldn't be going anywhere without PRC supply chains / rare earth processing. Besides PRC is calorie self-sufficient and produces enough raw resources domestically for war economy, and export to west is like... 5% of GDP total, i.e. trivial in total war scenario. Now go look up how much steel, oil and other primary inputs PRC generates domestically... it wouldn't remotely deindustrialize meanwhile PRC military capacity wouldn't just be untouched, it would be allocated the redirected industrial resources to sustain aquisitions multiple times current size.

It's 2022, India and Japan do not remotely have capability to blockade PLAN. Refer to the detailed studies coming out of US wonks recently are questioning the feasibility of whether US can effectively enforce a blockade at all, which btw is an act of war, and in age of networked mutual vunerabilities PRC has options to make US/containment partners to hurt comparably. The amount of oil US produces is not measured in millions of barrels but 130 vunerable refineries and other critical infra that PRC can target in retaliation. Absolutely expect US industrial outputs to come to a crawl, John Deere tractors bricked in the fields, and homes freezing because half the energy grid is compromised in event of PRC blockade. Or that we maybe in or near the timeline where PRC will gain conventional global strike capabilities that places US CONUS at conventional risk.

Without IPR restrictions, most of manufacturing can be quickly scaled up in places outside China. Also remember, India is nuclear power and understand Mutually Assured Destruction working between India and China.

>quickly scaled up

Quickly is more likely decades to reach appropriate as in case of rare earth processing. There's 20 years of supply chains entrenched in PRC that's not going to be replicated without substantial effort or time. That means allocating resources so strategic companies can survive while everyone else that relies on those inputs die. Btw, most of those experts needed to scale up elsewhere? They're from PRC in PRC building out PRC capacity for last 20 years. There's not enough experts globally to do such a task "quickly".

>Mutually Assured Destruction working between India and China

Yes, which is why the idea India would blockade PRC is fantasy. They fight with fists over barren rocks to prevent escalation spiral, and India has been firm in preventing QUAD into becoming a security alliance. They're not going to escalate to full scale war with PRC while eastern theatre command can shower most of India with missiles from barren Tibet while India has very limited ordnance to reach PRC strategic east coast or XJ. At least not for decades.

There will conceivably be a time when PRC is disentangled from global supplies chains or PRC neighbours have built sufficiently capabilities to target PRC cost free, but it won't be in short/medium term.

> go look up how much steel, oil and other primary inputs PRC generates domestically...

China is a massive net importer of oil.[1] I guess they can make steel with coal but they can’t get coal to the steel plants let alone run their whole industrial base if they lose Saudi oil. Russian western pipeline imports might continue for a while but after the super majors exited Russia that isn’t going to last regardless of embargoes.

> US wonks recently are questioning the feasibility of whether US can effectively enforce a blockade at all

What “wonks” are these? The US Navy is by far the largest blue water navy on earth. To disrupt most oil shipments to China could be done anywhere from the Gulf to Singapore and be far out of reach of the vast bulk of the Chinese navy. Just firing a cruise missile or two would do the trick.

> PRC has options to make US/containment partners to hurt comparably

Nonsense. Who precisely? China is surrounded by enemies or frenemies (ie Russia) the US is surrounded by trading partners and ocean and is a naval power second to none.

> 130 vunerable refineries and other critical infra that PRC can target in retaliation

The US has refineries dotted all over the country. The gulf coast refineries and the nation as a whole has one of the best security geographies on the planet. How is the PRC going to attack them exactly?

[1] https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/fi...

This is assuming brief embargo (blockade) and inevitable hot war after will last longer than PRC domestic production + strategic reserves + war rationing which is projected to stretch out over a year. 4M barrels a day plenty for war economy and maintaining industrial base for total war, indefinitely. PRC is not Japan who whithers on island resources alone. Which is really the scenario that anyway blockade will escalate to, total war. There seems to be this strange assumption that PRC would just sit there and eat embargo and passively erode away when they will run blockades by reflagging vessels under state and escalate/counter in other means including drawing US into first island chain defense commitments by attacking US forces stationed in JP/SKR.

>What “wonks” are these

Naval War College Review, something along the lines of "tactically tempting but strategically flawed". There's host of other recent literature that basically concludes that it's not viable at strategic level. Or that USN is large but not nearly large enough to maintain an active blockade for long without abandoning other important commitments. Amount of shipping going through Malacca is massive.

>Who precisely

Every US ally in first island chain is a few cruise missiles to ports/energy infra from regressing into developing country. They're all islands for functional islands _much_ worse food or energy security than PRC, which incidentally is what makes blockading PRC strategically flawed, because it can't be done without crippling US partners. Consider actual scale of force deployed in theatre (overwhelming in PRC favour and growing) and in actual war, US and allies aren't so much as surrounding PRC as being trapped within PRC's growing A2AD bubble. Surrounding PRC works fine for peacetime containment, but during wartime it forces US to go near PRC shores where USN is most vunerable due to security commitments. As for vaunted US naval power, it's limited to what US can deploy and sustain in theatre vs whole of PLA arsenal that's designed to dismantle US sustainment systematically.

>PRC going to attack them exactly

Cyber attacks on critical infra - there's a reason Biden communicated to RU/PRC despite all recent military sheningans and literal war against UKR that attacks on US critical infra = same as physical war. It doesn't matter how offensively capable US power projection is if US is defensively existentially vunerable on the homefront. Which flies over head most Murica strong and can blockade PRC relatively cost free proponents, sure, US can punch hard but like everyone else in networked infra era, US (likey) can't take a punch, but more historically importantly US isn't so out of reach by geography and technology anymore that it cannot be punched anymore. US want to blockade 10M barrels of imports a day? What if PRC takes out 10 million barrels of refinery infra. The scenario is not US can just starve PRC imports, but US and PRC will go balls out in escalation spiral to cripple each other's homefronts to the point of being unable to sustain modern life.

Or look at where PRC conventional hypersonic development and bulk of R&D/aquisition effort is trending. PLA is not rushing to catch up on 11 carrier groups or strategic bombers, they're focusing on precision strike conventional icbms that is able to hite every strategic node/asset in CONUS. Really around the world, i.e. Pinegap in AU. Every major strategic US platform like CVNs, SSBNs, B21s, have to sit still for maintenance sooner than later. Like entire USN runs on like 8 fast combat support ships for high tempo operation that rotates in theatre keep up replenishment. The MO behind PLA systems destruction warfare is to negate US military advantages and cripple US ability to operate at all. Of course PRC is similarly vunerable as well, but at the end of the day US loses much more being unable to defend global commitments because she can't support her blue water fleet than PRC who barely has any blue water obligations in the first place.

".. and the US navy could interdict all energy shipments to China .."

Generally, agree with your points, but the US Navy simply does not have the capability to do this any more. Might have been possible in 1990 but not today. US Navy would get its backside kicked.

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