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Comment by linksnapzz | Hacker News Reader

free trade's amazing, seriously!

Time was, mercantilist countries would use foreign colonies for resource extraction; and sell the goods manufactured with these resources back to them.

It was great for everyone!

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To a degree, this is Australia in this case, no? Resources are extracted from Australia, exported to China, turned into high value goods and sold back to them. In this case, it's exactly what OP is happy about!

Yes, everyone is always telling me how great colonialism was for the locals.

In theory it sounds like a great deal for the imperial center, but the system also requires high tariffs on all goods produced outside the empire to preserve the privileged mercantile relationships. If the same goods are cheaper imported from a different part of the world, then consumers would pay more despite all the self-important optics of being the "dominant" colonial power and presumably benefiting from the exploitation of their clients.

This helped produce the huge "imperial preference" controversy within the Conservative party in the late 1800s and contributed to the rise of the Liberals. Hardliners like Joseph Chamberlain refused to bend on external tariffs, so disaffected Tories like Winston Churchill defected in advocacy of free trade/cheaper goods being more important than blindly "pro-Empire" economics that were no longer competitive in the global market.

...and then the "colonies" figured out how to weaponize it and turn the balance in their favor.

Or, not quite: the workers are being exploited just like they were during the colonial period. But at least now their rulers have power over our rulers that they didn't have before. So they get to be happy about that as they make novelty items out of toxic plastic for Temu.

Modern China is a vastly better place to live than China of 60+ years ago. Many countries are nicer places to live, but 1+ Billion people are simply better off making the “exploitation” narrative ridiculous.

Porque no los dos? Given the number of billionaires in China, it can both be true that workers are exploited, meaning they could earning more for less hours, and that the living conditions are better on average and possibly medianely than the local minima of 1966.

1960 was way worse than 1966. My point was you can’t reasonably look at thousands of years of horror suddenly ending and then blame the solution for not being perfect.

How about before it was partitioned into colonies of various European powers? Population of China 60 years ago was half what it is now (700 Million).

Anyway, the answer is both. They were being exploited 60+ years ago, and they're still being exploited now, regardless of if they can take the train away from the factory that they work at to visit their relatives over the holidays.

China’s population was absolutely fucked over by the CCP to a level that is hard to comprehend. That had nothing directly to do with any foreign powers, but because Chinese workers became valuable to foreign markets their lives massively improved.

The government is still horrible, that’s unlikely to change but foreign markets aren’t the issue.

It can both be better than 60 years ago and worse than what you would consider a «good» life. Exploitation and being less poor are not mutually exclusive.

It is easier to think poor quality of life is ok for people you cannot identify with.

In living memory things when from famine so bad cannibalism was a widespread issue, to traffic jams. You can’t argue about quality of life here outside of profound ignorance.

The CCP was objectively the worst government across thousands of years, and foreign markets didn’t fix the underlying problems but they helped the general population in a way the government was never going to without them.

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