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Comment by superchroma | Hacker News Reader

I mean it's the gigantic elephant in the room. The reported narratives have aligned over the years as if they were our enemy.

Here are some:

Economically, they're an adversary; they undercut western manufacturing and all our manufacturing went there. They manipulate their currency. They interfere with foreign owned businesses. They steal IP. They're seeking to upset the global money standard. They entrap other nations with predatory loans for infrastructure. They trade with our other enemies and flaunt sanctions, etc, etc.

Ethically, they're our adversary: They use (basically) slave labor, unethical materials (e.g. live plucking), environmentally damaging materials (e.g. banned CFCs), they happily pollute the earth as if tomorrow isn't a concern. They are scraping the ocean clean to feed their people. They oppress their citizens, they operate a crude faux-democracy, they have embarked on an extremely damaging zero covid approach long after it ceased to be relevant to save face for creating it, etc, etc.

Politically, they're our adversary, insulting foreign politicians, trying to annexe land and sea that definitively isn't theirs (Tibet, "South China" Sea), engaging in brinksmanship to force the issue, etc.

These are all things from media stories that I can think of from the top of my head. Not exactly representation as a best friend.

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The biggest adversary of the United States is the United States.

Those factories migrated to the US South, then to Mexico, then to China. Not because of some conspiracy, but because we run our institutions based on quarterly financials.

I worked a long time ago on an effort to sue a large manufacturer whose supply chain was shipping counterfeit parts to certain customers. The Chinese partners ran a third shift with no QC and stuffed these parts into the distribution chain. They also stole defective parts and did the same thing. Everyone knew this was happening. But everyone was making money, so nobody gave a shit.

With respect to politics, well yeah, they are the other great power now. It’s in their interest to buffer themselves from whatever they perceive as a threat. The US is no babe in the woods here - our war plan from the 1950s onward was to attack China with nuclear weapons if the Soviets rolled into East Berlin - just in case.

The Chinese can’t compete with the US with air or sea power, so they seek to control their sphere of influence in other ways, and slowly build in preparation for the US decline in power.

I agree. The US (and other western countries) have let themselves fall victim to all sorts of corrupt ideologies; this has created short term 'limited liability' reward structures which have encouraged a short term mindset. Instead of focusing on fixing internal issues, the US decided to run their economy on the misery of others by starting wars in faraway lands, manipulating foreign governments, saddling them with debts to create artificial demand for USD to export inflation, then they monopolized 'the internet' with their own government-anointed big tech monopolies. Zero focus on creating real, profitable, value-adding businesses. Zero ethics.

China won this round fair and square... The smartest thing the west can do from now on is dump fiat currencies, switch to crypto and leave China holding the paper, but the longer the west fails to acknowledge that China beat it at its own game, the further it will fall.

> The smartest thing the west can do from now on is dump fiat currencies, switch to crypto

Seriously? WTF?

Wait a minute, you don't want to make jongjong's speculative crypto investments bear fruit so that he can retire in the Caribbean?

I mean he's gotta be an excellent mental gynmast to speak about real, profitable, value-adding businesses and crypto in the same post.

Radical, but the alternative is to honor all the currency paper China now holds. As someone who had no say over any of this, I don't see why I should play this game if I must join the losing side.

> Radical, but the alternative is to honor all the currency paper China now holds.

As if China is the only country that holds US paper. This sort of idea is what could very well start WWIII.

That's why it's a good idea to live outside any major capital city.

Crypto isn't possible with todays tech, because it's an ever increasing bug bounty program that's super slow and has no undo button for fraud (which the elderly are extremely susceptible to).

You could say the same about people having the ability to make wire transfers or international transfers. They're largely irreversible after some period. Every kind transaction becomes irreversible eventually.

No one has solved the elderly exploitation problem yet for the existing banking system. Not sure why it would be fair to hold crypto to a higher standard.

This is why we can’t have good things!

> then [the US and other western countries] monopolized 'the internet' with their own government-anointed unprofitable big tech monopolies

How did the government anoint Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook?

The problem with the quarterly profit motive is that it's not voluntary for the US electorate.

If Americans could vote on their preferred time intervals to manage towards, they wouldn't pick quarterly. Quarterly screws the overwhelming majority of people who care about the future.But it's not up for discussion, debate or the political process.

It's similar to US foreign military aid. Nothing anyone says or does will change it. Whoever or whatever controls it is beyond the reach of the political process, at least the part that 99% of people can participate in.

People treat quarterly myopia like an emergent phenomenon, like it's some kind of maximum that the country naturally converged upon. Except there's nothing natural about it, and it only benefits a small number of unaccountable people.

> Economically, they're an adversary; they undercut western manufacturing and all our manufacturing went there.

Wow, you make it sound like it was some devious Chinese plan where they intentionally made their people work for American manufacturers and lured them in with bribes.

The reality was that American corporations willingly went over to China because number must go up and paying their own people living factory wages wasn’t cutting it.

So tired of this stance - “China did it to us!”

America did it to itself.

> America did it to itself.

Corporations outsourced manufacturing to China, because American corporations are independent from the US government and profit-motivated.

If a corporation is HQed in and operated out of America, and diverts the bulk of its profits to American citizens, it is reasonable to say that "America did it to itself".

American citizens could have voted with their wallets, and they could have voted at the booths to elect governments that would regulate the flow of American jobs overseas. But they didn't, and so here we are.

I think it's important to draw distinctions as to the entity with authority to make a change.

In the Chinese system, that's the market but always capped by political and CCP decisions, if they deign to care.

In the American system, that's resolutely only the market. The government has some limited second order control (tariffs, industrial policy, national security exclusions), but generally didn't use them against China 1990-2018.

Ergo, the deciders moving manufacturing to China were the CEOs of American companies, optimizing their own production costs.

I'd be curious to see an analysis of the rise of Walmart (and immolation of Sears) and later Target vis-a-vis Chinese manufacturing of consumer goods sold in America. I'd be surprised if the centralization of point-of-sale (vs previous more diverse and independent stores) didn't incentivize bulk, low-cost offshore manufacturing via volume.

America is absolutely capable of setting tariffs on imports that would have made that unprofitable. In fact, that policy has been the norm at many times in countries precisely to protect domestic industry.

So it's really more accurate to say that America chose to allow it to be profitable for corporations to outsource. Government policy could easily have been the opposite. So ultimately, America did do it to itself.

(BTW I'm not arguing this would have necessarily been good policy. Just that it is very much an explicit governmental decision.)

this seems to misunderstand what tarrifs actually do. It's the US companies that pay the tarrifs. The concept of 'if we increase the tarrifs, US manufacturing will come back".

That's not how the world works. It takes years to switch a manufacturer depending on terms, who owns the molds, etc.

Placing tarrifs on China hurts American consumers. Instead, there should be tax incentives for producing stateside.

I'm not arguing whether tarriffs are good or bad, but the absolutely do work.

> It's the US companies that pay the tarrifs.

No, customers pay the tarriffs at the end of the day. Companies raise the prices of imported goods to cover the tarriffs, and tarriffs in this case are set so that the final retail price of imported goods matches (or exceeds) the domestic manufacturing price.

> The concept of 'if we increase the tarrifs, US manufacturing will come back"... It takes years...

The idea is generally to have tarriffs from the beginning so manufacturing never leaves. Because you're right, otherwise it does take years.

> Placing tarrifs on China hurts American consumers. Instead, there should be tax incentives for producing stateside.

There's no difference, they harm consumers equally. Corporate tax incentives mean reduced government income which needs to be made up for with... higher personal taxes. Or higher corporate taxes in other sectors which lead to higher prices. No matter what, the consumer is paying.

Tarriffs or tax incentives have the same effect, but tax incentives are usually much more difficult to design and limit corporate flexibility in bad ways that are hard to foresee. Tarriffs have much more reliable enforcement and predictable effects.

>No, customers pay the tarriffs at the end of the day.

This depends on the product and the type of demand. If it's inelastic, yes. if it's consumer focused, yes. But most of the time that's not the case. Tarrifs on material exports ar b2b, where pricing agreements are common.

At the end of the day, tarrifs create downward pressure on companies profit margins. If you instead, gave incentives it would put upward pressure on the companies who created fucundity for the economy.

yea corporations that are staunchly independent until the next recession where they beg for government handouts because they are too important to fail

We weren't smart enough to solve the tragedy of the commons situation because we believed a wealthy China would drop the true-believer Mao ideology.

They did drop maoism. China practices state run capitalism now.

If that was true they wouldn't have own-goaled their own tech sector.

Xi has been talking about returning to Marxism, which I presume means not Maoism and not Dengism.

Most people on HN basically have no idea what Marxism is, what the road to socialism is about, the stages of socialism, or why China really does what they do. I don't watch Xi's speeches on YouTube, but you could if you really wanted to.

They treat "not free market capitalism" as a monolith of ideas and states.

Even a light reading of Marxist economic theory with some other adjacent authors like Lenin, Mao, Trotsky, etc. would make clear exactly why Dengism was needed and why it worked and why Xi finds it necessary to return to straight Marxism.

The worst part is how greedy corporate oligarchs of the US sent all the jobs to China. That made Dengism work really well.

I mean, I don't really know what to say. If you wanted China to lose or not be Marxist, the US did a really bad job. It's really clear the only long-term planning the US does is lining pockets and that's probably going to be the death of the country.

But this is HN, so please pretend like I was complaining about wokeness or whatever other imaginary problem is popular here.

I quite like how the average American looks at China (not always fairly by the way - some of what you accuse China of doing is actually illegal in China) while being completely unable to hold a mirror to how their own economy works. It’s kind of entertaining to see a bully complains that there now is another bully in town.

>"bully complains that there now is another bully in town."

I think yours is the best reply to the post that reads more like a tantrum.

The problem is that a single-party propagandist republic is effectively a separate type of government than a representative republic and makes it harder to distinguish the will of the population.

The policies could be hidden from the vast majority of informed public opinion in a way Western conspiracists or whataboutists alike can only dream is really correspondent or directly analogous to mainstream media manipulation.

It can still be true that China’s no one’s enemy except that the Party is everyone’s enemy (while the Chinese population will be the last ones to realize it).

Pretty similar to the US. We don’t really have true representism. We just have two parties instead of one, but I’d wager the wills and wants of the ruling elite are just as far removed from the true wills and wants of the populace as they are in china.

I think this is an issue of perspective.

I know someone who quite recently died of Covid. There is no longer a pandemic, but the virus is still deadly. Their concern is justified.

Economically, the US is critically dependent on China for facilitating consumer demand. The US cannot afford an adversary in China.

Ethically, the US is not offering a compelling framework or alternative that alleviates the issues you raise. This is a real concern.

China has lifted hundreds of millions of people directly out of extreme poverty. This is their prerogative and modus operandi.

The only way forward is cooperation, adjustment and coordination.

If the CCP were so concerned with COVID why did they have a victory concert in August 2020[1]? Obviously the virus is still deadly, but it seems at least inconsistent for CCP COVID policy to be “we did it!” in August 2020, then lock downs in 2022.

Regarding “lifting people out of poverty”, did hundreds of millions of people’s hard work have anything to do with lifting _themselves_ out of poverty or does the CCP get all the credit? If CCP gets the credit, there was certainly a lot of “trial and error” before they got it right. Was it worth the lives of 30 million people?

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhans-mask-less-pool-party-...

I can understand this being hard to comprehend, but if China actually effectively deployed a zero covid policy initially - it's up to you whether you think the reports to this effect are true or not - then a mask-less concert is in fact pretty safe as long as you're not allowing foreigners to bring COVID into the country.

Of course the moment you let Americans in to your country, you've given up your battle against COVID since we decided to just let it rip.

China's not the only country that tried a zero COVID policy and for a while it was working in other places too thanks to management techniques, travel restrictions, quarantines, etc. (New Zealand is one, iirc) But when one of the biggest and most powerful countries in the world decides to just give up on the fight nobody else is going to win.

COVID wasn't anywhere close to just let rip in the US. There's an argument that happened late on in some very Trumpian districts, hence the wards full of dying vaccine deniers late in the pandemic, but overall the difference between COVID policies in Democrat and Republican regions was marginal. Both sides screamed to high heaven about every single wrinkle in policy like it was existential, but they all locked down.

> if China actually effectively deployed a zero covid policy initially - it's up to you whether you think the reports to this effect are true or not - then a mask-less concert is in fact pretty safe as long as you're not allowing foreigners to bring COVID into the country.

I mean it is not actually a matter of belief. We know how infectious COVID was, and we know life in China pretty much resumed as normal by August 2020, except for hard lockdowns wherever a case popped up. You cannot hide exponential growth of infections, it is simply impossible.

'Let it rip' is 'flatten the curve' for someone who unscientifically thinks zero Covid is practically possible.

China made the wrong decision and almost sparked an internal collapse. They lost the youth and the hopelessness in the country is palpable.

Where in China do you live?

How is thinking zero covid is possible in 2020 "unscientific"?

Did anyone try and fail at that point? Were there experiments that tried to achieve zero covid, exhausted all practical methods and still failed?

I'd argue that even today, zero covid is not "scientifically" proven practically impossible. The fact that China tried and failed does not mean it's inherently practically impossible. For all I can tell, it's only "practically impossible" because only China was able to pull off the authoritarian measures to suppress the spread of the virus. In a more authoritarian world, we might have been able to eradicate covid. Does your "science" include a deep discourse in political systems?

It was impossible after we learned a few things:

-R0 was quite high

-Animals can hold and spread the virus, so even after vaccinations of humans it was going to be in the background

-not every country was trying for zero Covid, therefore at some point in the future if you ever hope to have an open border with a country that has open borders with that country, you get it eventually.

-there are no 100% secure borders

> trying to annexe land and sea that definitively isn't theirs (Tibet, "South China" Sea)

The matter of Tibet is complex, and I think "definitively" is handwaving away a lot of Tibetan history.

In 1991, when Soviet Union collapsed and some parts of it had finally a lucky chance to go their own way, there was a lot of western "experts" who lectured new countries how complex their past was, how Soviet past should be also respected and shouldn't be handwaved away etc. It actually continued decades until very recently – Bucha happened.

So they do… basically all the things that the West used to do over the last few hundred years (some of them far more recently) to get ourselves into the position of economic and political power in the world we are in?

I mean, not to say they aren’t bad but we need to have more acknowledgement of the things our countries did in the past and why they were wrong, and looking to make reparations where possible, and not just hypocritically pretending that we didn’t do them while accusing other emerging powers of the things we did…

> They manipulate their currency. They interfere with foreign owned businesses. They steal IP. They're seeking to upset the global money standard. They entrap other nations with predatory loans for infrastructure. They trade with our other enemies and flaunt sanctions, etc, etc.

Aside from the money standard and zero COVID bits, every part of this is true of the US. This conflict just boils down to “the hegemon doesn’t want any competition.”

> they undercut western manufacturing and all our manufacturing went there.

America’s oligarchs did this to the country. China just leveraged their short-sightedness and greed to the country’s own advantage.

Can you provide the examples for US part in pervasive IP stealing, predatory infrastructure loans, trading with sanctioned countries? Not single issues (every country will have some examples here and there), but actually using those as long term strategies?

Huh? The US sets the sanctions.

We’ve changed our laws to legalize corruption and subsidize export of key industries. Steel is hardly made in Cleveland and Pittsburgh anymore for a simple reason: our tax and regulatory structure was reformed, and makes it more profitable to ship that business to China or Mexico.

Correct. But that doesn't support any of the claims I mentioned from bugglebeetle's comment.

To be fair, the US doesn't trade with sanctioned states because they (and the UK) are among the first to sanction other states. The EU just follows. Did China sanction any other states? Maybe Lithuania for opening a Taiwan representation office. But it's not sanctions, it's more like bullying.

China has sanctioned Lithuania for opening a Taiwan representative office, like you said.

Recently, they've also sanctioned Australia after the Australian government requested an independent investigation into the origins of the virus. This escalated into a one-sided trade war, particularly targeting Australian barley, wine and iron/steel exports.

As well as Norway, in 2010, after the independent Norwegian Nobel committee granted the Nobel Peace Prize to jailed Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo.

Just curious, if China sanctions the UK, would the US stop trading with the UK?

What is your opinion?

Why would they? The US doesn't care about who China sanctions, and the UK is one of US's closest allies.

Ok, just wanted to be clear.

Look into earlier in the Industrial Revolution and you'll find plenty of IP thefts and outright defiance of UK laws of technology export controls and laws against emigration of skilled workers. The US went further than "being a fence" and had agents stealing technology as early as 1787. It isn't limited to industrial technology. Music piracy got so bad in the 19th century that Gilbert and Sullivan premiered "The Pirates of Penzance" in New York first to stop the issues of rampant unauthorized productions seen by "HMS Pinafore". When they were the underdog the US could politely be described as "guilty as sin".

I offer this more for the sake of enlightenment and amusement than anything else.

(Agreed)

Those interested might want to look at this as well: https://creativelawcenter.com/dickens-american-copyright

Trading with sanctioned countries: happens all the time in support of various US wars. Too many examples during the Iraq War, but Iran Contra Scandal is a big one as the US President was directly involved.

Predatory infrastructure loans: that's what USAID, IMF and World Bank are basically set up to do.

There’s Samuel Slater (the traitor). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater

He was the most spectacular but hardly an isolated case. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/trade-secrets-intellectual-pir...

> The narratives have aligned over the years as if they were our enemy.

We've been narrated to over the years that they are our enemies, yes.

> They use (basically) slave labor, unethical materials (e.g. live plucking), environmentally damaging materials (e.g. banned CFCs), they happily pollute the earth as if tomorrow isn't a concern.

Why is this all of a sudden a problem when China does it, but not when our firms do this in their off-shore sweatshops and subsidiaries and mining and agricultural interests?

It sounds like all of these things aren't a problem, it's that we aren't profiting from them that's the problem.

Ethically, they are our enemies in the same scope that our multi-nationals are our enemies. They too are incompatible with human rights and democracy.

> Why is this all of a sudden a problem when China does it, but not when our firms do this in their off-shore sweatshops

It's certainly a problem! But the only thing we can really do about it is pass laws.

> It's certainly a problem!

If it were a problem, Washington could get it resolved in a year.

It's not a problem, because half the people bankrolling political campaigns are neck-deep in it! Their businesses are built on it! On cheap labour, on captive markets, on sources of third-world resources that are accessed through theft, violence, or corruption!

And even if you aren't directly involved, our society will not function very well if we stop reaping the benefits of all the practices I've described. Nobody wants to pay $90 for a t-shirt, or $9 for a gallon of gas.

I see two kinds of people saying either:

1. The west is doing immoral things and hiding it. Let's talk about it and force people in charge to change things or change the people in charge!

Or:

2. The west is doing immoral things. Let's root for these other guys who are also doing immoral things; eventually they will replace the west and then somebody will figure out how to stop them from doing the immoral things.

I think (2) is predicated on the fact that the west wrong doings are so old and irreparable and so they can be only washed away through a complete blank slate rewrite of the geopolitical order.

I think this is a relatively "natural" effect of our human psychology. We have an innate sense of "punishing" people and we often find ways to rationalize and explain why they should be punished. However these instincts are ill suited to handle geopolitics because there are many more people involved that the "tribe" size of our natural selection environment and also because the time scale of the changes is usually much longer than what people are used to in their day to day relationships.

I think logic (2) is flawed because once the new power structure is formed it will be hard to change exactly like (1) or even worse. Furthermore it will have done immoral things for quite some time by then because changes to geopolitical power balances will take a long time to actuate and thus they new power will also become "irreparable" and the only thing left to do will be to root for the next "underdog".

3) west has done and continues to do things they deem immoral to stay ahead while use propaganda and coercion against others when they do the same things to catch up. Folks who fall for their own propaganda and clash with those that don't.

I don't think that's different from what I said in (1):

"The west is doing immoral things and hiding it"

The propaganda aspect you're mentioning is an integral part of "hiding it".

I don't think you're framing changes the options on the table: either you try to fix the system from within our you somehow hope that the others will be better just because.

IMO third framing is west is weaponizing/moralizing development tactics when "immoral" methods are simply effective development methods that west doesn't want their competitors to adopt. The TLDR is there isn't anything to fix per say, sometimes developing fast and catching up to incumbants takes breaking a lot of eggs. The eggs are of course humans, and it's tempting to build propaganda atrocity narratives to deter such behaviour. Frequently it even comes from a genuine place, hence many useful idiots who drink the koolaid can advocate for it strongly, but these narratives are ultimately, on a geostrategic level, self serving for entrenched interests/winners who wants to stay on top. The logic of (3) is recognizing that the liberal world/rule-based-order is a rigged game, and it's in the understandable self-interest that others don't want to play in an already unfair system.

Thanks, I think this is a very astute analysis

No point engaging with the points, I was simply recounting anti-chinese narratives that western media has produced over time. The point is that the overwhelming amount of press they get is negative or at best neutral. They're treated like enemies in the media. politicians use anti-china talking points routinely. The average westerner is unlikely to regard them positively. I wouldn't call this friendship.

The same logic could easily apply to every other manufacturing heavy country (Japan, India, etc). There are just as many unethical companies operating in the country (Dupont/Monsato/3M) hit by massive lawsuits. And trying to influence domestic issues in other countries has led to the numerous wars the US have started in modern times, not to mention the annexation of Hawaii because of blatant business interests.

the world is tired of the US finding applying double standards to whoever they want to make their enemy.

> They're seeking to upset the global money standard.

The disturb the global standard, which happens to benefit the US greatly while hurting the rest of the world (especially the global south). Terrible!

> They use (basically) slave labor,

While it is true that China has a lot of manual labor and less worker rights than most western states, China isnt the sweatshop it used to be anymore.

Nearly every "simple" labor intensive industry, like textile industry, has moved to countries like Bangladesh, while strangely no one seems to care about their slave labor.

Also, wasn't the "slave labor" the reason why the US cooperated with China, essentially making them what they are today? [1]

> They manipulate their currency.

How dare they? https://brrr.money

> They entrap other nations with predatory loans for infrastructure.

I could write a book about this but whatcha doin' over there? [2]

> they happily pollute the earth as if tomorrow isn't a concern.

China is ranking 48 in Co2 emissions per capita, the US in ranking 14 (2021) [3]

Also they are investing more into renewable energy than every other country, by far [4]

> They are scraping the ocean clean to feed their people.

China fished 11.7 million metric tons in 2020, the US fished 4.23 million metric tons, China fishes approx. three times as much as the US. [5]

But China has 1.4 billion citizens, while the US has 331 million citizens, so China has over 4 times the citizens.

Also the average Chinese eats 40.3kg of fish every year, while average American eats 22.2kg of fish every year. [6]

So to sum up: China fishes three times as much as the US, while having 4 times the population that eats nearly twice as much fish as a US citizen does.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimerica

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil-for-Food_Programme

[3] https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-china-the-main-climate-c...

[4] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-invests-546...

[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/240225/leading-fishing-n...

[6] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fish-and-seafood-consumpt...

Like, great job, but you completely missed the point of the post by addressing the anecdotes. My point was western media prints uniformly negative stories about them and treats them like an enemy. The stories may be true, or not, or fair, or not. It's immaterial. They represent the battle for the hearts and minds of North America.

What a few words can do :D

Then this shall be taken as a counterpoint to the narratives you pointed to :)

Western media prints uniformly negative stories about everyone. So at least in this regard, China is getting equal treatment (news sells; non-news does not sell).

I would rather simply point out that they are after our way of living.

How is this any worse than what Saudi Arabia does, that we overtly consider a US ally?

> undercut western manufacturing and all our manufacturing went there.

Notice that western itself is a collective of nation but all hell breaks lose if non western got manufacturing am I rite?

Having said that be thankful for ultra scaling up manufacturing in East Asia. Appliances and electronic prices keeps falling. Compare that to services or "western" exclusive manufacturing like vehicles, getting inflated like crazy.

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