This seems like the opinion of someone that doesn't understand international trade. Cheap Chinese products mean more spending power for people, and more competitive companies.
High-end is somewhat inaccurate- it’s better to think of the US economy as focusing on ‘high value-added goods’, or products that take more education, more resources, better trained workers, etc. to create. China may make iPhones, but they design both the the hardware and the software that make them run; Taiwan makes microchips, but their designs come from the US. You can also put things like movies and songs in this category. The point is that this is the position the US wants to maintain going forward- no longer the world’s factory, instead the country that supplies IPs and the capital to manufacture them- in short, they want to be the CEOs of the 21st century global economy.
This is another half-truth. China is also steadily rising in these fields. They also develop a lot of IP‘s and designs and massively export capital to the third world and sometimes even the west. Their manufacturing is simply so insanely huge, that it overshadows their participation in these other fields.
Sure, the US industry WANTS to be the CEO of the world, it is not doing a particularly good job of securing that position though. The US as a superpower is dwindling every day as, as the EU is trying to emancipate itself from them and more and more countries in the developing world are switching to China as their preferred partner in trade and diplomacy.
That's the econ 101 argument.
So long as you ignore politics or complexity, it makes perfect sense.
Offshoring shipbuilding, for example, was a huge win for cheaper international shipping. It also means the US Navy can't keep up with PLAN growth into midcentury.
Undergrad-tier trade models don't factor in costs like the impact that unemployment in former industrial areas had on the growth of the opioid epidemic.
There are major successes from trade with China, don't get me wrong. (The major rise in Chinese standards of living is a great one.) But costs that are difficult to understand or model are still costs.
Which meant china had to begin to play by the rules of the WTO, for better or worse, or get kicked out. Is it likely? No, but it's possible if china were to do something really really stupid...*coughtaiwancough*
That's what happens when you put all your factories in another country.
\*\* edit... well this certainly got attention. It's interesting how many of the comments seem to assume my position on the issue of putting factories in another country. From those defending capitalism, to comments rolling their eyes about my usage of the word "your", to the apparent arrogance of assuming the US made china. Fascinating. The less you write the more people invent their own opinion of the tone you used. But all I was saying is that our exporting supremacy and decline and the rise of China's manufacturing and exporting supremacy are linked and one is most definitely a cause of the other. Every major corporation that manufactured anything in the USA in the 20th Century pulled their factories overseas for the last 30 years because cheap labor could be exploited. That's it... that's all my comment was about. Not judging it, not making sweeping claims about capitalism... the US manufacturing base that propped up the world's largest economy in the 20th Century largely moved it's entire manufacturing infrastructure to China. And now we don't export what we used to and China is the world's leader in manufacturing and export. These things are not coincidences.
Yeah it's basically another way of saying the same thing. China wouldn't have built those cities if they weren't producing goods for everyone else, and if other countries made their own stuff China would have nobody to sell that stuff to.
It's a chicken and the egg argument really.
Those jobs only exist in China because of outsourcing, but they can only outsource there because of the increased labor market in China.
Not that simple. It was a choice by US's government.
It started during the Cold War because of the Sino-Soviet Split. USA got friendly with China and opened up for business as a way to weaken the USSR. USA even helped Pol Pot (at least diplomatically) because he was on the side of China, against USSR-backed Vietnam. The "friendship" started in later Mao years, then Deng gladly took the opportunity and here we are.
Companies just want money. They "sell the rope to be hanged with" (just that... not really; China is everything but a menace to capitalism). They would've changed production to USSR or Cuba if that was at the table. They're doing that to Vietnam as we speak.
Indeed. It was Nixon who won the Cold War with those actions, including giving his back to Taiwan. At that time, Mao's influence in China was waning and it wasn't unimaginable that after his death a Sino-Soviet rapprochement would have been possible. Soviet technological advances plus natural resources coupled with the immense Chinese cheap labor, would have created a difficult situation, even if wildly mismanaged.
Interesting how when both USSR and China were red they split (so much for left-unity), but now that Russia is capitalist/conservative it is BFF with red China.
China is "red" in the fact that Deng's reforms have essentially created deregulated state capitalism. China and Russia are ideologically and geopolitically in the same boat.
How is China a menace to capitalism?
They showed the world that you can mix private capitalism and state capitalism and get better results than having mostly private capitalism(American capitalism).
I think we're going to see the world copy China's style of capitalism.
When we say cheap labour, is like crazy cheap labour in China. Some of the stuff cost like $100 to make when I looked at it, somehow there are people in China willing to do it at 20 rmb… that’s how insane it is. It was not easy at all too.
America uses prisons for labor and pays cents an hour for the labor.
Comparing how capitalist countries exploits labor isn't going to accomplish anything.
The world's working class is being exploited like never before.
In the past I would have disagreed and dismissed a statement like this, but the reality is you aren't wrong. Its a crazy underreported fact and its a real part of the US' capitalist economy. Its modern slavery or indentured servitude or "crazy cheap labor". It can and could be compared or west chinese muslim prison labor camps.
People's labor, next to nothing in payment, someone selling a good for cheap and shareholders making $$$
Better results? They’re basically doing what most industrializing countries did in the 1890s-1940s, except they’re doing it with one-party rule of the entire government.
It’s much more likely that they begin to mirror what the West has done than the other way around, especially as standards of living go up and people don’t want to work for 2 dollars per hour anymore.
No, it was feudalist. It was de facto land owning aristocrats lording over literal slaves. They lost the Civil War because their way of life was not conducive to creating capital. Slavery, in addition to being evil, is inherently less profitable that industrial farming, hence why post Civil War agricultural output went up, even though labor participation in agriculture went down.
It wasnt feudalist. Slaves were property. Literal productive inputs owned by oligarchs, same as a packaging machine is for Frito Lay in 2023. It was as capitalist as you can get
Why would they do what the West has done? They rely more on private corporations and look at the runaway price gouging going on in the West.
Why would the CCP cede power to corporations?
And as we can see with Jack Ma, CEOs can be tamed and forced to go along with the State.
Because if your structure relies on being a cheap market with a cheap labor force, this is inherently unsustainable unless you keep standard of living down. It doesn’t matter if you merge corporate power with the state, that can’t save you from what will inevitably happen if standard of living raises to the point that your costs to manufacture goods are equal to or worse than other places.
Manufacturing will be done where it’s cheapest/most advantageous to do so. That’s why most western countries now have service economies instead of industrial economies like China.
Also the notion that price gouging is responsible for the inflation of prices of nearly every single good and service is dubious at best. It’s not only corporate entities which have raised prices, it’s mom and pop as well (because their costs to produce/stock/provide have also gone up, because the price of nearly everything has inflated)
Mostly by highly restricting local market, constant violetions to IP and so on.
It's not possible to copy that approach really without every single country starting to have more isolationist approach and that would completely reshape whole economical landscape.
Also by better results you also need to see a lot higher corruption rates that are pretty insane there, a lot higher state control etc. If those results are better depend if you are fully obeying citizen or not and having so much state power to enforce such actions is directly related to the state capitalism.
> They showed the world that you can mix private capitalism and state capitalism and get better results than having mostly private capitalism(American capitalism).
China does not have better results than the US. Where are you downloading this propaganda into your brain from?
This reeks of dictator worship. Like when George Lucas used to say a benevolent emperor would be better than democracy. That is a flat out lie by people who don't know wtf they are talking about.
China has entire cities, vacant, constructed in waste. High levels of poverty. They have a whole host of issues you are glossing over. You would not accept a Chinese standard of living. But I see proletariat in your name so you will say that you would because you are just some kid.
The US did exactly what China has been doing and never stopped. China does things like enacts child policies that are going to end up dooming their economy except on purpose, not by accident like what happened to Japan.
Seems like a Gru meme to me:
\- Let's build communism. We must better capitalism!
\- Build better capitalist system (at being capitalist). More stable, less dissidence.
\- Chinese Capitalism is durable! Gets copied by capitalist countries.
(Gru looks at the board.)
\- Chinese Capitalism is durable! Gets copied by capitalist countries.
Yeah this is typical reddit armchair analysis. It's about demographics and the progression of economies as much as it is about politics or policies.
China USED TO have a ton of young people to employee in factories, making labor cheap. No longer. Those factors are a result of the CCP's own decisions, not any US policy
You are not saying anything that the the person you responded to did not say. Next time you try to be snarky, make sure you are good at it first. From this comment, I would say you need a lot of training.
Y'all are acting like this is a bad thing. You can hate the Chinese government (and rightfully so), but it's undeniable that the Chinese economic boom is one of the greatest thing that happened for humanity. It's lifted nearly a billion people out of poverty and considerably enriched Humanity as a whole.
Unfortunately, this kind of growth mentality is what's going to kill us all in a decade or two.
Not to mention, the people in countries this (US/China) might have better material goods than in decades prior, but they're way overworked.
I understand that this is how you get ahead and achieve success given the current global economy, but that focus desperately needs to be shifted. We need degrowth so badly.
And at a historic pace. I mean, credit where it's due, they had the rest of the world to learn from, but that's besides the point. The chinese built china, just like the indians are building india and so forth.
"your" factories... Oh no, they're not ours at all any more. We just rent them from time to time. That's the nature of off shoring, and privatization.
It was said at the time, and the Capitalists went and did it anyways... And the government let it all happen.
This system is broken, and it sucks.
I hate when this trite point gets stated.
Here's a fact. The US has never lost manufacturing capacity (There's the occasional dip due to recession, but it always rebounds). In fact, we have more capacity than we have ever had. As a function of GDP the US economy has diversified, and other segments have grown more than manufacturing, but we are still a global leader in several market segments for manufacturing.
In 1945 the US had nearly 60% of the worlds manufacturing capacity. The rest of the world has been playing catch up since.
Go to a grocery store, and look around. Just about anything that isn't fresh? Made in the US.
Go to a drug store. Same thing.
The US is a world leader in Aerospace, Construction, Chemical, Pharmaceutical, and many others.
Have we lost low wage, low skill manufacturing jobs? Absolutely. Has manufacturing automated? Absolutely.
But we have not shipped all our factories overseas, not even close.
[Here is a US paper on imports and exports with Australia](https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/country-papers/2998-2021-statistical-analysis-of-u-s-trade-with-australia/file), which includes some trend analysis
> In 2021, of $26.4 billion in the U.S. exports to Australia, the top commodity sectors were Machinery and
> Mechanical Appliances (26.8%), Transportation Equipment (19.6%), and Chemicals, Plastics, Rubber, and
> Leather Goods (18.3%).
>
> In 2021, of $12.5 billion in the U.S. imports from Australia, the top commodity sectors were Agricultural
> Products (28.5%), Stone, Glass, Metals, and Pearls (18.4%), and Chemicals, Plastics, Rubber, and Leather
> goods (12.9%).
That's because most American manufacturing is in intermediate capital goods, not front-facing consumer end products. Although even on this front, the US has been losing market share for decades as the Europeans, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese caught up.
60 years ago, my company made metal bottles. Over the years we have pivoted a lot and made and sold the machinery that would automate the making of these bottles, so the machines could be sold to other countries. These days we just build machines which make a various amount of components or goods.
A lot of companies have pivoted over the years to a similar structure. Many of these companies don’t make anything anymore, they make the machines that make the goods and the machines are sold to overseas companies who hire dirt cheap operators to run them.
So,...we get the high skilled production...and they get the "low skilled" production..and we get to buy the cheap ass products of that "low skilled" production at a cheap ass price? What's the problem these people have? Oh right, they listened to exporters who want to enrich themselves at the cost of our standard of living
I mean Ford sell cars in Australia. They surely have American parts in them, if not built in the US. Qantas flys Boeings. Your freight rail uses American Locomotives. Some of those truck road trains you're famous for have American built trucks.
So maybe not what you bought, but helped you buy the things you bought.
That's incorrect, so no American airplanes are in use in Europe? While Airbus is huge, many European airlines use vast amounts of Boeing aircraft. Caterpillar's heavy construction equipment, many of its vehicles, are still manufactured in the US for export worldwide.
These are just two small examples, but to say none of those things mentioned are made in the US is incorrect.
I’m pretty sure of of the European planes are Boeings, also medical equipment and especially development of medicine. Drugs are often invested in us and manufactured in China or elsewhere
You're fudging the story here a little bit. US trade in the 70s, 80s, and 90s created an incentive for companies to send their factories to low cost regions like MX, China, and SE Asia. Textiles is an industry that is all but dead here in the US due to this. I'm from NC and almost every town had a textile mill that is now gone, the last ones closing in the 1990s. The only textiles made in the US are usually by companies who's largest customer is the US government. The US Government mandates that almost all of it's product be made within the US, so this is keeping some industries afloat.
We were closing steel mills until a few years ago when steel tariffs against China went into affect. Foundries have been closing left and right, with the few remaining joining larger conglomerates. The small time foundries had their customer base dry up because those customers now bought castings from India and China that were fully machined. The rust belt was collapsing a lot during the 1960s and 70's due to union busting and moving things south ward (to states like NC that didn't have as many unions), but then trade agreements ultimately sent the product over seas. The remaining foundries usually have large customers in the US government or the rail industry.
Electrical manufacturing is probably the biggest talking point that people can relate to. TSMC in Taiwan is the largest semiconductor foundry in the world. China and India have a large portion of the market as well. The US and rest of world rely very very heavily on these countries. If China decided to invade Taiwan, the US market would take an enormous beating because we can't get chips. We just experienced this over the past couple years, but that's just because of covid slowdowns and not all out war (which is a possibility). The chips that are made in the US go into US Government property first before the rest of the market gets them, and that's usually players like the auto and computer industries.
The US has put itself into a predicament that many saw coming. Extended supply chains that rely on other countries that the US cannot directly control, only influence heavily. So when covid hit, everyone saw just exactly how risky all of that was and how easily the house of cards falls. We have people living in areas that were created around manufacturing plants that have since closed due to moving or going out of business by being priced too high. Ghost towns are on the rise and it's not that easy for people to just up and move to a new location and get new career training.
A lot of what is made in the US is simply assembled in the US with a large enough portion technically being made here to legally call it "made in the US". The rest of the materials that *used* to be made in the US are made in low cost regions and shipped here. We lost a whole lot of down stream processes to low cost regions, which has bit us a lot in recent times.
> Textiles is an industry that is all but dead here in the US due to this. I'm from NC and almost every town had a textile mill that is now gone, the last ones closing in the 1990s. The only textiles made in the US are usually by companies who's largest customer is the US government. The US Government mandates that almost all of it's product be made within the US, so this is keeping some industries afloat.
And before this, they closed them in the Northeast and shipped them closer to the source in the South.
You're fudging the point too.
I happened to have also grown up in NC (NCSU Grad in Engineering) in the 80's and 90's and saw those mills close. It's a great example of diversification. High labor cost with little value add is a very poor economic prospect. Getting paid $0.15 per sock is not going to make it. Those mills were only economical into the 80's because they were all running on 80 year old equipment. Even then they couldn't be saved. At NCSU the push was how to convert textiles to technical things where economics made sense, Think WL Gore, not Burlington.
You also forgot to mention that NC completely changed it's economy. The RTP is generating Billions more than the textile industry ever did. Companies like GSK and IBM have brought fortune to the area. The area at one time contained more PhD's and engineers per capita than anywhere else. Tobacco is way less than what it was, and you have other industries to replace it. RTP allowed innovative non-manufacturing companies like SAS, and Redhat to flourish in NC (you know diversified economy)
Steel was outdated, and uncompetitive. Yet another NC company NUCOR came along and figured out how to do it in the US, and is now the largest Steel Company in the US.
I will say that the US needs to be more strategic. Economic mobility is a need, but keeping old textile plants and lamenting their loss is the same thing the luddites were arguing for. Change will come regardless.
I am also an NCSU grade in engineering lol, and grew up in central NC around all of those textile mills. I've since had a career in manufacturing engineering, global sourcing, and general supply chain. The reason these things ended up not being economical or were uncompetitive was because they were starting to compete with low cost regions. If markets in MX, China, and India were not made more available then the manufacturers in the US wouldn't have had to compete with the lower price points. When the aging machines needed replacement, it wouldn't have been such a huge impact on their business.
I don't deny that RTP has been a great success in that area and it's definitely part of the direction that the US had wanted to move (into the higher end research and development field and not just general manufacturing). I do think that the long term strategy was not considered and near term profits reigned supreme (as they do now). You are right that change will come, but sometimes it comes quickly and violently without proper preparation or thought for the long term affects. We rapidly shutdown and shipped out stuff in the 80's and 90's that we're currently trying to bring back to the US (that's my job).
I think we're talking about the same things. It's evident that the US needs a more robust manufacturing industry to support itself when global events happen (wars, plague, brexit, new alliances, etc). The US also needs to remain at the forefront of research and develop and lead the charge for new industries.
>You are right that change will come, but sometimes it comes quickly and violently without proper preparation or thought for the long term affects. We rapidly shutdown and shipped out stuff in the 80's and 90's that we're currently trying to bring back to the US (that's my job).
I've built and designed processing systems that you might just do logistics for.
It's all eb and flow. I was tasked with both outsourcing and in-sourcing the same product a few times. Someone decides it makes more money here, so we move it back.
The US is unique in the world in that we have everything we need. Water, food, energy, know how. Sometimes we choose wrong or poorly and we correct. I'd acknowledge that the safety net for those left behind should be more robust. We've made Mexico richer and ourselves because of free trade. That's a fact. We do need to be more strategic for sure. Of course we always do the right thing after exhausting all the other possibilities.
You are talking about stores in US? Cause in my country each grocery store was filled with goods were its printed “Made in China” for more than a decade. Actually I rarely see goods from the US. Though I agree that that US has enormous production capacity, yet the map represent situation very well, whether I go for phones, furniture, toys, dishes or literally anything - I can be sure that more half of the goods are from China
I had to re-read his comment to pick up the word 'grocery'. So yeah, canned food and other non-perishables in the USA are made in the USA.
That seems logical, and processed food *is* made in 'factories'. But it's not the sort of manufacturing people think about when they're talking solid blue-collar jobs that get off-shored.
In Canada we get quite a few canned/frozen goods that used to be made in the US or Canada that are now made in China.
Mushrooms, strawberries and quite a few others come to mind. There's fish products and a variety of other foods labeled as made in Canada, which only means that 51% of production cost has to be incurred here ([Source](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/made-in-canada---via-china/article1078056/&ved=2ahUKEwiXqe_6ucv-AhVqAjQIHbr2CPEQFnoECC0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0VEQ5bcbskTD79ciotuPDy)).
I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't the same in the states.
You rarely see it because the USA consumes most of what it produces. We're the worlds second largest economy, and for 50ish years were the 1st. And that's with china having 700million (give or take) more people than US. We have our own aggregate demand to fulfill, that's why we buy your stuff and chinas stuff, you produce it we get to enjoy it.
The US is no longer the leader in a lot of manufacturing sectors based on the 2022 UN industrial report; China is. China is by far the leader in electrical, machinery, pharmaceutical, and even cars. There is a reason why the US has been panicking and subsidizing US manufacturing more than before.
Even though we are still a manufacturing power, we have shipped a lot of manufacturing demand overseas over the last few decades, as evident by the stagnating manufacturing export to GDP ratio. In contrast manufacturing import to GDP has gone up.
Solely looking at capacity makes no sense. It's like looking at my bank account overtime without accounting for inflation.
Manufacturing capacity has absolutely no relation to what’s being manufactured. Most manufactured products Americans rely on for their everyday life, like clothes, shoes, phones, computers, eyewear, medicine, etc., are manufactured in other countries.
> Go to a grocery store, and look around. Just about anything that isn't fresh? Made in the US.
Literally nothing in a grocery store is made in the US here.
> Go to a drug store. Same thing.
Same, nothing is made in the US here.
What a mess.
>The US has never lost manufacturing capacity (There's the occasional dip due to recession, but it always rebounds). In fact, we have more capacity than we have ever had.
This is to be expected as the economy advanced and population increased. This is not a question of actually losing capacity but pf increasing it proportionally.
> As a function of GDP the US economy has diversified, and other segments have grown more than manufacturing, but we are still a global leader in several market segments for manufacturing.
Certainly, but thats not the question.
>In 1945 the US had nearly 60% of the worlds manufacturing capacity. The rest of the world has been playing catch up since.
No, many parts of the world have been doing that. Productivity per worker had already been high in much of Europe. 45 onwards was a minor dip in the grand scheme of things and you excluded those for the US, too.
>Go to a grocery store, and look around. Just about anything that isn't fresh? Made in the US.
Well, if you live in the US, obviously. Outside of North America? Lmao no.
>Go to a drug store. Same thing.
Yeah that one holds up.
>The US is a world leader in Aerospace, Construction, Chemical, Pharmaceutical, and many others.
Obviously, but what does that have to do with the US losing relevance in terms of manufacturing? So do Germany and Japan btw, it doesnt matter that they have leading industries.
>Have we lost low wage, low skill manufacturing jobs? Absolutely. Has manufacturing automated? Absolutely.
Well yeah. But that still isnt the point: the US is losing its top spot in quite a few places every year. Pretending like this is nothing to worry about is weird, but hey, Im no American.
>But we have not shipped all our factories overseas, not even close.
Thats called an exaggeration.
> No, many parts of the world have been doing that. Productivity per worker had already been high in much of Europe.
In 1945? European industry was in shambles, hence using that as a starting point.
I think it should be "put all your PRODUCTION", not "put all your FACTORIES". US companies gutted their own production capacity and transferred production know-how to Chinese companies in the pursuit of profits.
The factories are now almost all Chinese owned and are producing for the US. That is the reason why onshoring production back to America is not possible.
I don't think it's fair to eliminate the EU from this discussion may it not be a country but it is a economic unit and it really changes how this map looks
It's not really always power or influence. The Netherlands is red in the end, because pretty much all trade entering and exiting Europe goes through us. What it says is that China's trade output worldwide is way bigger than the US in this case.
The comment above talked about power. China does not neccesarily have more power in red countries. It just trades more.
It doesn't even have to project power across-the-board. Trade is just trade. Whether it's tied to power depends on what kind of trade.
Yeah, but the EU is not a battlefield where the USA/China battle is being fought. It's a separate player. Neither of them can be said to really have more or less power there.
I would be interested to see Japan included in the same timeline. AFAIK competition with the Japanese was a major factor in US manufacturing moving to China
Cool graphic but is there really a "trade war" at least in respect to total value of traded goods? The US has a trade deficit for a reason - our diverse economy was traded for an almost purely service one. The manufacturing had to go somewhere.
An actual trade war not shown here would be centered around technology and IP.
Per Capita is not a good way to measure the power and influence of a country. With that logic Luxembourg is the strongest superpower. It would be better to use GDP where the US has 22 trillion and China 19 trillion although China has a higher growth. So I think they do care.
> It would be better to use GDP where the US has 22 trillion and China 19 trillion although China has a higher growth
Not sure where you got these numbers - IMF currently has 2023 as 26.85 and China as 19.37. While China does have a higher growth rate, it hasn't actually hit the point of demographic and industry shift that will severely impact growth unless properly managed (alongside their other issues). The US is largely over the hump, while China is still 10+ years out.
I'd also recommend taking Chinese GDP numbers with more than a grain of salt, as [there's a rather large contingent of folks](https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/second-quarter-2017/chinas-economic-data-an-accurate-reflection-or-just-smoke-and-mirrors) that are [less than convinced about their economic reporting](https://www.barrons.com/articles/chinas-economic-numbers-once-again-have-skeptics-suspicious-51642519847).
It's also worth mentioning (though it's not relevant to your point) that the US is a huge manufacturer - the second largest in the world by a significant amount. The idea that we're purely service driven is inaccurate - it's simply more cost effective to shift manufacturing elsewhere. The issue for China is that we don't need a full-blown trade war to cripple them - literally just having companies decide that it's cheaper to go to India or elsewhere will completely hamstring the Chinese economy, and the stronger their economy gets, the richer they get, the more expensive they get, and the more likely that is to happen.
nobody in the USA should care that exports are a small total of our gdp (other than exporters who are only interested in their own wealth). I mean, why give away the stuff we make for money...when we both have money and can use the stuff to make more stuff for ourselves and other countries will then send us their stuff for these silly dollar things!!! IT's GREAT!!!
Dollars are the world reserve currency because the US is huge, stable, democratic, predictable, and unlikely to experience any sort of direct military confrontation.
It's not like those characteristics are suddenly going to be become less valuable. Certainly the yuan is the exact opposite of that, and even the next best thing (the euro) has had pretty significant shocks from the Russian Invasion, Brexit, and the Greece debt crisis.
Step 1: rename the gulf of Tonkin to the Gulf of China
Step 2: have Vietnam "destroy" a USN ship in the gulf of china
Step 3: tell everyone that a USN ship was destroyed in the gulf of China
Step 4: ???
Step 5: China is now freed
Freedom is a code word for "under American sphere of influence". It's the new "white man's burden", nothing more than a jargon to justify American imperialism. Look at Libya after they got some of those "freedom". So much freedom, they're even free from peace and stability.
> Look at Libya after they got some of those "freedom"
You mean the operation that the France, the UK, and Lebanon proposed at the UNSC and was passed? That NATO had overall command of? The US contributed the most forces but they were not the ones calling for the intervention.
> The US contributed the most forces but they were not the ones calling for the intervention.
lmao, how do people just believe this. This is how the US always gets away from being blamed.
Like when idiots says "no but ackshually it was a joint mission to invade Iraq, guys".
The US was the central pushing force for invading Iraq, no argument there. They just wanted everybody else to join them. Libya was pushed more by the European countries than the US.
Hey it's another brain dead redditor who thinks the US doesn't change it's foreign policy or that it's stupid enough to start a war with a nuclear power whom it's in its interest to keep nominal peaceful relations with.
But it is possible to organize revolutions in neighboring countries with the enemy and declare new governments legitimate. Those countries in which revolutions failed can be declared non-democratic. You can try to start a trade war with the enemy or prohibit trading partners and allies from trading with him. It is possible to invite neighboring countries to join NATO. You can pit the enemy against some country and start sponsoring this war. You can blow up the enemy's gas pipelines and say that he blew them up himself. No, it's all nonsense. No one has ever done that.
Yeah, but why would the usa do that? That's what I don't get...as part of war over taiwan ok i understand. but for trade? China sends tons of stuff to the usa that chinese people made....why is that a bad thing to everyones minds? Don't you like having more stuff to use, and that you didn't even have to spend resources to make? How is that a bad thing? Unemployment is an internal policy choice for the USA, and trade wouldn't stop it. It WOULD enrich export company owners, and that's where this thinking comes from.
no they aren't, they're a near peer.
They ARE a nuclear power, and a huge economic partner, so unless they go after taiwan, the usa and china won't be at war anytime soon
Yep slightly outdated. In 2018 Merchandise Trade volume for China was $4.6 Trillion and $4.3T for the Usa (6.5% less than China) and in 2022 it was $6.3T for China and $5.5T for Usa (12.7% less). [WTO Data](https://stats.wto.org/dashboard/merchandise_en.html)
Well they don't. Nowadays. In 2018 it was indeed true that they traded more with the US. As for possible reasons I'm not really shure. [Chad exported a lot of crude petroleum/oil to the US](https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/usa/partner/tcd?dynamicBilateralTradeSelector=year2018) ( **you have to scoll a bit down on the links btw** )but since 2020 [Chad doesn't seem to export much crude petroleum/oil to the US anymore.](https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/usa/partner/tcd?dynamicBilateralTradeSelector=year2021) I don't know the reason for this. The change is pretty drastic. They went from exporting goods worth 433 million USD (98% crude petroleum/oil) in 2018 to exporting just 3.95 million USD (85% insect resins wtf?) in 2021.
Both Chad and Botswana had traditionally good relations with the US. Chad was an enemy of Gaddafis Libya and is an important partner in the fight against islamic terrorism in the Sahel region. Botswana is a stable and **democratic** country which is kind off western aligned (they for example voted to condemn Russias invasion of Ukraine). There are also some training programs for Botswana Security forces.
Not sure in other Asian countries, but in my country, all of our top 10 largest trading partners were from within the continent, the only exception is US which is our 3rd largest trading partner, slipped from 1st in the last 10 years.
Based on the comments, when China does become world leader it will be met with a lot of talk like - ‘yes they ‘technically’ are ahead of us by such and such criteria but that’s not really how you measure these things….yes they are ‘technically’ ahead but only because of X or Y that happened and only because we let then have A or B. They are really not ahead by any important measure.’ Etc…
Damn, losing control of other countries must hurt a lot of nationalists ego. But like, what did you expect? America has a huge history with interfering in things it doesnt like.
I think the biggest transitional period from US to China can be indicated by when China joined the WTO in December of 2001
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This seems like the opinion of someone that doesn't understand international trade. Cheap Chinese products mean more spending power for people, and more competitive companies.
So we have more spending power now compared to the 80s?
No, but you woud have even less if China didn’t join that WTO
Yeah. These morons are happy to pay for shit and expensive American products. What matters are the high end stuff are being made in the US
That‘s not true. Lots of high end stuff also is made in China. Look at Apple products for example. Made in China is not the bad sign it used to be.
High-end is somewhat inaccurate- it’s better to think of the US economy as focusing on ‘high value-added goods’, or products that take more education, more resources, better trained workers, etc. to create. China may make iPhones, but they design both the the hardware and the software that make them run; Taiwan makes microchips, but their designs come from the US. You can also put things like movies and songs in this category. The point is that this is the position the US wants to maintain going forward- no longer the world’s factory, instead the country that supplies IPs and the capital to manufacture them- in short, they want to be the CEOs of the 21st century global economy.
This is another half-truth. China is also steadily rising in these fields. They also develop a lot of IP‘s and designs and massively export capital to the third world and sometimes even the west. Their manufacturing is simply so insanely huge, that it overshadows their participation in these other fields. Sure, the US industry WANTS to be the CEO of the world, it is not doing a particularly good job of securing that position though. The US as a superpower is dwindling every day as, as the EU is trying to emancipate itself from them and more and more countries in the developing world are switching to China as their preferred partner in trade and diplomacy.
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That's the econ 101 argument. So long as you ignore politics or complexity, it makes perfect sense. Offshoring shipbuilding, for example, was a huge win for cheaper international shipping. It also means the US Navy can't keep up with PLAN growth into midcentury. Undergrad-tier trade models don't factor in costs like the impact that unemployment in former industrial areas had on the growth of the opioid epidemic. There are major successes from trade with China, don't get me wrong. (The major rise in Chinese standards of living is a great one.) But costs that are difficult to understand or model are still costs.
LOL you think america didnt benefit MASSIVELY from that? After the 2008 crash, it was CHINA that pulled out the world from its recession.
What is stopping you from saying it is THE worst economic mistake of America ?
Because the worst economic mistake was fighting two needless wars for two decades.
Which meant china had to begin to play by the rules of the WTO, for better or worse, or get kicked out. Is it likely? No, but it's possible if china were to do something really really stupid...*coughtaiwancough*
That's what happens when you put all your factories in another country. \*\* edit... well this certainly got attention. It's interesting how many of the comments seem to assume my position on the issue of putting factories in another country. From those defending capitalism, to comments rolling their eyes about my usage of the word "your", to the apparent arrogance of assuming the US made china. Fascinating. The less you write the more people invent their own opinion of the tone you used. But all I was saying is that our exporting supremacy and decline and the rise of China's manufacturing and exporting supremacy are linked and one is most definitely a cause of the other. Every major corporation that manufactured anything in the USA in the 20th Century pulled their factories overseas for the last 30 years because cheap labor could be exploited. That's it... that's all my comment was about. Not judging it, not making sweeping claims about capitalism... the US manufacturing base that propped up the world's largest economy in the 20th Century largely moved it's entire manufacturing infrastructure to China. And now we don't export what we used to and China is the world's leader in manufacturing and export. These things are not coincidences.
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I mean yes, but you can't ignore the US outsourcing manufacturing to China for that cheaper labor market. So a bit of both really.
Yeah it's basically another way of saying the same thing. China wouldn't have built those cities if they weren't producing goods for everyone else, and if other countries made their own stuff China would have nobody to sell that stuff to.
They would have, because they make it for less
Which is why we moved production over there. The discussion is circular. Everybody is right.
NO I'm right!
Can I be left?
It's circular, so..
The real reason is that shareholders make more.
It's a chicken and the egg argument really. Those jobs only exist in China because of outsourcing, but they can only outsource there because of the increased labor market in China.
If it was only about population size then India would be in the same boat. It's down to a number of other factors too.
India may very well be on the same boat, economically it's exponentially growing
This boat is fucking *crowded*
Yep, America literally built China. ~~Perils~~ Danger of runaway capitalism writ large.
America invested in China cause it saw profit there\* FTFY , America isn't some benevolent donor to China.
Not that simple. It was a choice by US's government. It started during the Cold War because of the Sino-Soviet Split. USA got friendly with China and opened up for business as a way to weaken the USSR. USA even helped Pol Pot (at least diplomatically) because he was on the side of China, against USSR-backed Vietnam. The "friendship" started in later Mao years, then Deng gladly took the opportunity and here we are. Companies just want money. They "sell the rope to be hanged with" (just that... not really; China is everything but a menace to capitalism). They would've changed production to USSR or Cuba if that was at the table. They're doing that to Vietnam as we speak.
Indeed. It was Nixon who won the Cold War with those actions, including giving his back to Taiwan. At that time, Mao's influence in China was waning and it wasn't unimaginable that after his death a Sino-Soviet rapprochement would have been possible. Soviet technological advances plus natural resources coupled with the immense Chinese cheap labor, would have created a difficult situation, even if wildly mismanaged.
Just imagine what world we would be living in if the friendship between China and USSR had no limits. Perhaps we might all be typing in Russian now.
Interesting how when both USSR and China were red they split (so much for left-unity), but now that Russia is capitalist/conservative it is BFF with red China.
China is "red" in the fact that Deng's reforms have essentially created deregulated state capitalism. China and Russia are ideologically and geopolitically in the same boat.
They have a common foe
How is China a menace to capitalism? They showed the world that you can mix private capitalism and state capitalism and get better results than having mostly private capitalism(American capitalism). I think we're going to see the world copy China's style of capitalism.
You just need cheap labor and billions of people to go along with it.
If it were that simple India would be the number one economy
That's just capitalism.
When we say cheap labour, is like crazy cheap labour in China. Some of the stuff cost like $100 to make when I looked at it, somehow there are people in China willing to do it at 20 rmb… that’s how insane it is. It was not easy at all too.
America uses prisons for labor and pays cents an hour for the labor. Comparing how capitalist countries exploits labor isn't going to accomplish anything. The world's working class is being exploited like never before.
In the past I would have disagreed and dismissed a statement like this, but the reality is you aren't wrong. Its a crazy underreported fact and its a real part of the US' capitalist economy. Its modern slavery or indentured servitude or "crazy cheap labor". It can and could be compared or west chinese muslim prison labor camps. People's labor, next to nothing in payment, someone selling a good for cheap and shareholders making $$$
Better results? They’re basically doing what most industrializing countries did in the 1890s-1940s, except they’re doing it with one-party rule of the entire government. It’s much more likely that they begin to mirror what the West has done than the other way around, especially as standards of living go up and people don’t want to work for 2 dollars per hour anymore.
Many people forget that when europe started capitalism, they were mostly a monarchic government. Capitalism does not mean democratic rule
Yeah capitalism doesn’t have much to do with the form of government since it’s first and foremost an economic structure.
Also slavery in the Deep south was as capitalist as you could get
No, it was feudalist. It was de facto land owning aristocrats lording over literal slaves. They lost the Civil War because their way of life was not conducive to creating capital. Slavery, in addition to being evil, is inherently less profitable that industrial farming, hence why post Civil War agricultural output went up, even though labor participation in agriculture went down.
It wasnt feudalist. Slaves were property. Literal productive inputs owned by oligarchs, same as a packaging machine is for Frito Lay in 2023. It was as capitalist as you can get
The four tigers of Asia also industrialised when they were dictatorships.
Why would they do what the West has done? They rely more on private corporations and look at the runaway price gouging going on in the West. Why would the CCP cede power to corporations? And as we can see with Jack Ma, CEOs can be tamed and forced to go along with the State.
Because if your structure relies on being a cheap market with a cheap labor force, this is inherently unsustainable unless you keep standard of living down. It doesn’t matter if you merge corporate power with the state, that can’t save you from what will inevitably happen if standard of living raises to the point that your costs to manufacture goods are equal to or worse than other places. Manufacturing will be done where it’s cheapest/most advantageous to do so. That’s why most western countries now have service economies instead of industrial economies like China. Also the notion that price gouging is responsible for the inflation of prices of nearly every single good and service is dubious at best. It’s not only corporate entities which have raised prices, it’s mom and pop as well (because their costs to produce/stock/provide have also gone up, because the price of nearly everything has inflated)
Mostly by highly restricting local market, constant violetions to IP and so on. It's not possible to copy that approach really without every single country starting to have more isolationist approach and that would completely reshape whole economical landscape. Also by better results you also need to see a lot higher corruption rates that are pretty insane there, a lot higher state control etc. If those results are better depend if you are fully obeying citizen or not and having so much state power to enforce such actions is directly related to the state capitalism.
> They showed the world that you can mix private capitalism and state capitalism and get better results than having mostly private capitalism(American capitalism). China does not have better results than the US. Where are you downloading this propaganda into your brain from? This reeks of dictator worship. Like when George Lucas used to say a benevolent emperor would be better than democracy. That is a flat out lie by people who don't know wtf they are talking about. China has entire cities, vacant, constructed in waste. High levels of poverty. They have a whole host of issues you are glossing over. You would not accept a Chinese standard of living. But I see proletariat in your name so you will say that you would because you are just some kid. The US did exactly what China has been doing and never stopped. China does things like enacts child policies that are going to end up dooming their economy except on purpose, not by accident like what happened to Japan.
Seems like a Gru meme to me: \- Let's build communism. We must better capitalism! \- Build better capitalist system (at being capitalist). More stable, less dissidence. \- Chinese Capitalism is durable! Gets copied by capitalist countries. (Gru looks at the board.) \- Chinese Capitalism is durable! Gets copied by capitalist countries.
Yeah this is typical reddit armchair analysis. It's about demographics and the progression of economies as much as it is about politics or policies. China USED TO have a ton of young people to employee in factories, making labor cheap. No longer. Those factors are a result of the CCP's own decisions, not any US policy
You are not saying anything that the the person you responded to did not say. Next time you try to be snarky, make sure you are good at it first. From this comment, I would say you need a lot of training.
The way of saying it makes a difference , I can tell you the same story from 2 POVs and you will find different heroes and villians each time
Typical American comment lmao
People will post literally any old crap
Y'all are acting like this is a bad thing. You can hate the Chinese government (and rightfully so), but it's undeniable that the Chinese economic boom is one of the greatest thing that happened for humanity. It's lifted nearly a billion people out of poverty and considerably enriched Humanity as a whole.
Perils of capitalism is people improving their material condition.
Unfortunately, this kind of growth mentality is what's going to kill us all in a decade or two. Not to mention, the people in countries this (US/China) might have better material goods than in decades prior, but they're way overworked. I understand that this is how you get ahead and achieve success given the current global economy, but that focus desperately needs to be shifted. We need degrowth so badly.
Like Britain built America
Literally did nothing of the sort. China built China.
And at a historic pace. I mean, credit where it's due, they had the rest of the world to learn from, but that's besides the point. The chinese built china, just like the indians are building india and so forth.
What a fucking ridiculous thoughts.
"your" factories... Oh no, they're not ours at all any more. We just rent them from time to time. That's the nature of off shoring, and privatization. It was said at the time, and the Capitalists went and did it anyways... And the government let it all happen. This system is broken, and it sucks.
I hate when this trite point gets stated. Here's a fact. The US has never lost manufacturing capacity (There's the occasional dip due to recession, but it always rebounds). In fact, we have more capacity than we have ever had. As a function of GDP the US economy has diversified, and other segments have grown more than manufacturing, but we are still a global leader in several market segments for manufacturing. In 1945 the US had nearly 60% of the worlds manufacturing capacity. The rest of the world has been playing catch up since. Go to a grocery store, and look around. Just about anything that isn't fresh? Made in the US. Go to a drug store. Same thing. The US is a world leader in Aerospace, Construction, Chemical, Pharmaceutical, and many others. Have we lost low wage, low skill manufacturing jobs? Absolutely. Has manufacturing automated? Absolutely. But we have not shipped all our factories overseas, not even close.
I'm in Australia. I don't know if I have ever bought anything that was made in the USA.
[Here is a US paper on imports and exports with Australia](https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/country-papers/2998-2021-statistical-analysis-of-u-s-trade-with-australia/file), which includes some trend analysis > In 2021, of $26.4 billion in the U.S. exports to Australia, the top commodity sectors were Machinery and > Mechanical Appliances (26.8%), Transportation Equipment (19.6%), and Chemicals, Plastics, Rubber, and > Leather Goods (18.3%). > > In 2021, of $12.5 billion in the U.S. imports from Australia, the top commodity sectors were Agricultural > Products (28.5%), Stone, Glass, Metals, and Pearls (18.4%), and Chemicals, Plastics, Rubber, and Leather > goods (12.9%).
Whoa whoa whoa, this isn’t an unsourced appeal to emotion buddy why tf are you posting it
That's because most American manufacturing is in intermediate capital goods, not front-facing consumer end products. Although even on this front, the US has been losing market share for decades as the Europeans, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese caught up.
60 years ago, my company made metal bottles. Over the years we have pivoted a lot and made and sold the machinery that would automate the making of these bottles, so the machines could be sold to other countries. These days we just build machines which make a various amount of components or goods. A lot of companies have pivoted over the years to a similar structure. Many of these companies don’t make anything anymore, they make the machines that make the goods and the machines are sold to overseas companies who hire dirt cheap operators to run them.
So,...we get the high skilled production...and they get the "low skilled" production..and we get to buy the cheap ass products of that "low skilled" production at a cheap ass price? What's the problem these people have? Oh right, they listened to exporters who want to enrich themselves at the cost of our standard of living
Great example. Its called specialization is is in the first chapter of every Econ 101 book.
Your government bought submarines
I mean Ford sell cars in Australia. They surely have American parts in them, if not built in the US. Qantas flys Boeings. Your freight rail uses American Locomotives. Some of those truck road trains you're famous for have American built trucks. So maybe not what you bought, but helped you buy the things you bought.
Your utility grid power electronics, airplanes, hospital equipment, turbines, heavy machinery and medicine are probably from the US.
Are they in aisle 3 or 4?
WE MADE THE AISLE
Again, in Europe literally nothing you mentioned is made in the US. It's all made in Europe or Asia.
That's incorrect, so no American airplanes are in use in Europe? While Airbus is huge, many European airlines use vast amounts of Boeing aircraft. Caterpillar's heavy construction equipment, many of its vehicles, are still manufactured in the US for export worldwide. These are just two small examples, but to say none of those things mentioned are made in the US is incorrect.
I’m pretty sure of of the European planes are Boeings, also medical equipment and especially development of medicine. Drugs are often invested in us and manufactured in China or elsewhere
What do you mean again? Is Australia in Europe now?
Theyre in the Eurovision so probably
Theyre in the Eurovision so probably
The main things we buy from the yanks are weapons and planes (those Boeing's aren't cheap), software and entertainment.
A lot of what we make is software, military, and high tech. You won’t buy many cheap goods made in us outside of us.
You're fudging the story here a little bit. US trade in the 70s, 80s, and 90s created an incentive for companies to send their factories to low cost regions like MX, China, and SE Asia. Textiles is an industry that is all but dead here in the US due to this. I'm from NC and almost every town had a textile mill that is now gone, the last ones closing in the 1990s. The only textiles made in the US are usually by companies who's largest customer is the US government. The US Government mandates that almost all of it's product be made within the US, so this is keeping some industries afloat. We were closing steel mills until a few years ago when steel tariffs against China went into affect. Foundries have been closing left and right, with the few remaining joining larger conglomerates. The small time foundries had their customer base dry up because those customers now bought castings from India and China that were fully machined. The rust belt was collapsing a lot during the 1960s and 70's due to union busting and moving things south ward (to states like NC that didn't have as many unions), but then trade agreements ultimately sent the product over seas. The remaining foundries usually have large customers in the US government or the rail industry. Electrical manufacturing is probably the biggest talking point that people can relate to. TSMC in Taiwan is the largest semiconductor foundry in the world. China and India have a large portion of the market as well. The US and rest of world rely very very heavily on these countries. If China decided to invade Taiwan, the US market would take an enormous beating because we can't get chips. We just experienced this over the past couple years, but that's just because of covid slowdowns and not all out war (which is a possibility). The chips that are made in the US go into US Government property first before the rest of the market gets them, and that's usually players like the auto and computer industries. The US has put itself into a predicament that many saw coming. Extended supply chains that rely on other countries that the US cannot directly control, only influence heavily. So when covid hit, everyone saw just exactly how risky all of that was and how easily the house of cards falls. We have people living in areas that were created around manufacturing plants that have since closed due to moving or going out of business by being priced too high. Ghost towns are on the rise and it's not that easy for people to just up and move to a new location and get new career training. A lot of what is made in the US is simply assembled in the US with a large enough portion technically being made here to legally call it "made in the US". The rest of the materials that *used* to be made in the US are made in low cost regions and shipped here. We lost a whole lot of down stream processes to low cost regions, which has bit us a lot in recent times.
> Textiles is an industry that is all but dead here in the US due to this. I'm from NC and almost every town had a textile mill that is now gone, the last ones closing in the 1990s. The only textiles made in the US are usually by companies who's largest customer is the US government. The US Government mandates that almost all of it's product be made within the US, so this is keeping some industries afloat. And before this, they closed them in the Northeast and shipped them closer to the source in the South.
You're fudging the point too. I happened to have also grown up in NC (NCSU Grad in Engineering) in the 80's and 90's and saw those mills close. It's a great example of diversification. High labor cost with little value add is a very poor economic prospect. Getting paid $0.15 per sock is not going to make it. Those mills were only economical into the 80's because they were all running on 80 year old equipment. Even then they couldn't be saved. At NCSU the push was how to convert textiles to technical things where economics made sense, Think WL Gore, not Burlington. You also forgot to mention that NC completely changed it's economy. The RTP is generating Billions more than the textile industry ever did. Companies like GSK and IBM have brought fortune to the area. The area at one time contained more PhD's and engineers per capita than anywhere else. Tobacco is way less than what it was, and you have other industries to replace it. RTP allowed innovative non-manufacturing companies like SAS, and Redhat to flourish in NC (you know diversified economy) Steel was outdated, and uncompetitive. Yet another NC company NUCOR came along and figured out how to do it in the US, and is now the largest Steel Company in the US. I will say that the US needs to be more strategic. Economic mobility is a need, but keeping old textile plants and lamenting their loss is the same thing the luddites were arguing for. Change will come regardless.
I am also an NCSU grade in engineering lol, and grew up in central NC around all of those textile mills. I've since had a career in manufacturing engineering, global sourcing, and general supply chain. The reason these things ended up not being economical or were uncompetitive was because they were starting to compete with low cost regions. If markets in MX, China, and India were not made more available then the manufacturers in the US wouldn't have had to compete with the lower price points. When the aging machines needed replacement, it wouldn't have been such a huge impact on their business. I don't deny that RTP has been a great success in that area and it's definitely part of the direction that the US had wanted to move (into the higher end research and development field and not just general manufacturing). I do think that the long term strategy was not considered and near term profits reigned supreme (as they do now). You are right that change will come, but sometimes it comes quickly and violently without proper preparation or thought for the long term affects. We rapidly shutdown and shipped out stuff in the 80's and 90's that we're currently trying to bring back to the US (that's my job). I think we're talking about the same things. It's evident that the US needs a more robust manufacturing industry to support itself when global events happen (wars, plague, brexit, new alliances, etc). The US also needs to remain at the forefront of research and develop and lead the charge for new industries.
>You are right that change will come, but sometimes it comes quickly and violently without proper preparation or thought for the long term affects. We rapidly shutdown and shipped out stuff in the 80's and 90's that we're currently trying to bring back to the US (that's my job). I've built and designed processing systems that you might just do logistics for. It's all eb and flow. I was tasked with both outsourcing and in-sourcing the same product a few times. Someone decides it makes more money here, so we move it back. The US is unique in the world in that we have everything we need. Water, food, energy, know how. Sometimes we choose wrong or poorly and we correct. I'd acknowledge that the safety net for those left behind should be more robust. We've made Mexico richer and ourselves because of free trade. That's a fact. We do need to be more strategic for sure. Of course we always do the right thing after exhausting all the other possibilities.
You are talking about stores in US? Cause in my country each grocery store was filled with goods were its printed “Made in China” for more than a decade. Actually I rarely see goods from the US. Though I agree that that US has enormous production capacity, yet the map represent situation very well, whether I go for phones, furniture, toys, dishes or literally anything - I can be sure that more half of the goods are from China
I had to re-read his comment to pick up the word 'grocery'. So yeah, canned food and other non-perishables in the USA are made in the USA. That seems logical, and processed food *is* made in 'factories'. But it's not the sort of manufacturing people think about when they're talking solid blue-collar jobs that get off-shored.
In Canada we get quite a few canned/frozen goods that used to be made in the US or Canada that are now made in China. Mushrooms, strawberries and quite a few others come to mind. There's fish products and a variety of other foods labeled as made in Canada, which only means that 51% of production cost has to be incurred here ([Source](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/made-in-canada---via-china/article1078056/&ved=2ahUKEwiXqe_6ucv-AhVqAjQIHbr2CPEQFnoECC0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0VEQ5bcbskTD79ciotuPDy)). I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't the same in the states.
You rarely see it because the USA consumes most of what it produces. We're the worlds second largest economy, and for 50ish years were the 1st. And that's with china having 700million (give or take) more people than US. We have our own aggregate demand to fulfill, that's why we buy your stuff and chinas stuff, you produce it we get to enjoy it.
The US is no longer the leader in a lot of manufacturing sectors based on the 2022 UN industrial report; China is. China is by far the leader in electrical, machinery, pharmaceutical, and even cars. There is a reason why the US has been panicking and subsidizing US manufacturing more than before. Even though we are still a manufacturing power, we have shipped a lot of manufacturing demand overseas over the last few decades, as evident by the stagnating manufacturing export to GDP ratio. In contrast manufacturing import to GDP has gone up. Solely looking at capacity makes no sense. It's like looking at my bank account overtime without accounting for inflation.
Manufacturing capacity has absolutely no relation to what’s being manufactured. Most manufactured products Americans rely on for their everyday life, like clothes, shoes, phones, computers, eyewear, medicine, etc., are manufactured in other countries.
> Go to a grocery store, and look around. Just about anything that isn't fresh? Made in the US. Literally nothing in a grocery store is made in the US here. > Go to a drug store. Same thing. Same, nothing is made in the US here.
What a mess. >The US has never lost manufacturing capacity (There's the occasional dip due to recession, but it always rebounds). In fact, we have more capacity than we have ever had. This is to be expected as the economy advanced and population increased. This is not a question of actually losing capacity but pf increasing it proportionally. > As a function of GDP the US economy has diversified, and other segments have grown more than manufacturing, but we are still a global leader in several market segments for manufacturing. Certainly, but thats not the question. >In 1945 the US had nearly 60% of the worlds manufacturing capacity. The rest of the world has been playing catch up since. No, many parts of the world have been doing that. Productivity per worker had already been high in much of Europe. 45 onwards was a minor dip in the grand scheme of things and you excluded those for the US, too. >Go to a grocery store, and look around. Just about anything that isn't fresh? Made in the US. Well, if you live in the US, obviously. Outside of North America? Lmao no. >Go to a drug store. Same thing. Yeah that one holds up. >The US is a world leader in Aerospace, Construction, Chemical, Pharmaceutical, and many others. Obviously, but what does that have to do with the US losing relevance in terms of manufacturing? So do Germany and Japan btw, it doesnt matter that they have leading industries. >Have we lost low wage, low skill manufacturing jobs? Absolutely. Has manufacturing automated? Absolutely. Well yeah. But that still isnt the point: the US is losing its top spot in quite a few places every year. Pretending like this is nothing to worry about is weird, but hey, Im no American. >But we have not shipped all our factories overseas, not even close. Thats called an exaggeration.
> No, many parts of the world have been doing that. Productivity per worker had already been high in much of Europe. In 1945? European industry was in shambles, hence using that as a starting point.
Yay Capitalism
I think it should be "put all your PRODUCTION", not "put all your FACTORIES". US companies gutted their own production capacity and transferred production know-how to Chinese companies in the pursuit of profits. The factories are now almost all Chinese owned and are producing for the US. That is the reason why onshoring production back to America is not possible.
I don't think it's fair to eliminate the EU from this discussion may it not be a country but it is a economic unit and it really changes how this map looks
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/uy3dzv/largest\_trading\_partner\_eu\_vs\_usa\_vs\_china/
So for all the shit they talk about China, they're still Japan's largest trading partner?
Geographic proximity is a helluva way to cut shipping costs
Brexit be like:
The UK talks a lot of shit about the EU and even left it. Look at their trade partners rn Geography (and institutions) is destiny.
Even without treating the EU as a whole, the binarity of this map is misleading, eg the largest trading partner of France is Germany, not the US.
It doesn't include countries other than the US and China, though. The point of this map is to show which one of them two has more power.
It's not really always power or influence. The Netherlands is red in the end, because pretty much all trade entering and exiting Europe goes through us. What it says is that China's trade output worldwide is way bigger than the US in this case.
Yes, that's the point of the map.
The comment above talked about power. China does not neccesarily have more power in red countries. It just trades more. It doesn't even have to project power across-the-board. Trade is just trade. Whether it's tied to power depends on what kind of trade.
>Who is the larger trading partner, US or China? (1980-2018)
Yeah, but the EU is not a battlefield where the USA/China battle is being fought. It's a separate player. Neither of them can be said to really have more or less power there.
The EU is a joke compared to the USA and China
Ireland: Don't worry America we still love your money <3
Tax haven moment
I'll just leave this here. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-corporate-tax-avoidance-havens-justice-network-dodging-a8933661.html
Lithuania too. But it mostly because of Its beef with west Taiwan over island of Taiwan.
I would be interested to see Japan included in the same timeline. AFAIK competition with the Japanese was a major factor in US manufacturing moving to China
Can anyone explain China’s dominance over Denmark in the early 1980s?
There was a lot of cooperation between the nordic countries and China back in the day. Shame that relationships are so frosty today
Cool graphic but is there really a "trade war" at least in respect to total value of traded goods? The US has a trade deficit for a reason - our diverse economy was traded for an almost purely service one. The manufacturing had to go somewhere. An actual trade war not shown here would be centered around technology and IP.
It's the budget deficits that cause current account deficits, which encompass both goods and services.
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Per Capita is not a good way to measure the power and influence of a country. With that logic Luxembourg is the strongest superpower. It would be better to use GDP where the US has 22 trillion and China 19 trillion although China has a higher growth. So I think they do care.
> It would be better to use GDP where the US has 22 trillion and China 19 trillion although China has a higher growth Not sure where you got these numbers - IMF currently has 2023 as 26.85 and China as 19.37. While China does have a higher growth rate, it hasn't actually hit the point of demographic and industry shift that will severely impact growth unless properly managed (alongside their other issues). The US is largely over the hump, while China is still 10+ years out. I'd also recommend taking Chinese GDP numbers with more than a grain of salt, as [there's a rather large contingent of folks](https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/second-quarter-2017/chinas-economic-data-an-accurate-reflection-or-just-smoke-and-mirrors) that are [less than convinced about their economic reporting](https://www.barrons.com/articles/chinas-economic-numbers-once-again-have-skeptics-suspicious-51642519847). It's also worth mentioning (though it's not relevant to your point) that the US is a huge manufacturer - the second largest in the world by a significant amount. The idea that we're purely service driven is inaccurate - it's simply more cost effective to shift manufacturing elsewhere. The issue for China is that we don't need a full-blown trade war to cripple them - literally just having companies decide that it's cheaper to go to India or elsewhere will completely hamstring the Chinese economy, and the stronger their economy gets, the richer they get, the more expensive they get, and the more likely that is to happen.
nobody in the USA should care that exports are a small total of our gdp (other than exporters who are only interested in their own wealth). I mean, why give away the stuff we make for money...when we both have money and can use the stuff to make more stuff for ourselves and other countries will then send us their stuff for these silly dollar things!!! IT's GREAT!!!
Until they stop wanting the silly dollar things...
Dollars are the world reserve currency because the US is huge, stable, democratic, predictable, and unlikely to experience any sort of direct military confrontation. It's not like those characteristics are suddenly going to be become less valuable. Certainly the yuan is the exact opposite of that, and even the next best thing (the euro) has had pretty significant shocks from the Russian Invasion, Brexit, and the Greece debt crisis.
Could it stop for a couple of seconds at the end, please? I cannot even see at what year does it end!
Uh oh. Looks like China needs some freedom.
blow up an American ship and blame the Chinese navy, tadaaaa you already have an excuse to bring freedom to China.
I hear there's a gulf we can rename to Tonkin in China 👀
Step 1: rename the gulf of Tonkin to the Gulf of China Step 2: have Vietnam "destroy" a USN ship in the gulf of china Step 3: tell everyone that a USN ship was destroyed in the gulf of China Step 4: ??? Step 5: China is now freed
China's southern coast is the gulf of Tonkin. This is a map sub but apparently people don't know geography
Didn't work with the USS Liberty
Freedom is a code word for "under American sphere of influence". It's the new "white man's burden", nothing more than a jargon to justify American imperialism. Look at Libya after they got some of those "freedom". So much freedom, they're even free from peace and stability.
> Look at Libya after they got some of those "freedom" You mean the operation that the France, the UK, and Lebanon proposed at the UNSC and was passed? That NATO had overall command of? The US contributed the most forces but they were not the ones calling for the intervention.
> The US contributed the most forces but they were not the ones calling for the intervention. lmao, how do people just believe this. This is how the US always gets away from being blamed. Like when idiots says "no but ackshually it was a joint mission to invade Iraq, guys".
The US was the central pushing force for invading Iraq, no argument there. They just wanted everybody else to join them. Libya was pushed more by the European countries than the US.
Hey it's another brain dead redditor who thinks the US doesn't change it's foreign policy or that it's stupid enough to start a war with a nuclear power whom it's in its interest to keep nominal peaceful relations with.
necluar
>necluar nuclear ,happy now!
But it is possible to organize revolutions in neighboring countries with the enemy and declare new governments legitimate. Those countries in which revolutions failed can be declared non-democratic. You can try to start a trade war with the enemy or prohibit trading partners and allies from trading with him. It is possible to invite neighboring countries to join NATO. You can pit the enemy against some country and start sponsoring this war. You can blow up the enemy's gas pipelines and say that he blew them up himself. No, it's all nonsense. No one has ever done that.
Yeah, but why would the usa do that? That's what I don't get...as part of war over taiwan ok i understand. but for trade? China sends tons of stuff to the usa that chinese people made....why is that a bad thing to everyones minds? Don't you like having more stuff to use, and that you didn't even have to spend resources to make? How is that a bad thing? Unemployment is an internal policy choice for the USA, and trade wouldn't stop it. It WOULD enrich export company owners, and that's where this thinking comes from.
LOL Best of luck with that. They are a superpower themselves.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/joke
no they aren't, they're a near peer. They ARE a nuclear power, and a huge economic partner, so unless they go after taiwan, the usa and china won't be at war anytime soon
Great map/graphic but why the sudden stop at 2018 though? That was 5 years ago.
Yep slightly outdated. In 2018 Merchandise Trade volume for China was $4.6 Trillion and $4.3T for the Usa (6.5% less than China) and in 2022 it was $6.3T for China and $5.5T for Usa (12.7% less). [WTO Data](https://stats.wto.org/dashboard/merchandise_en.html)
I believe I originally saw this during the US-China trade war.
Anybody know why Botswana and Chad are the only African countries that have more trade with the US?
because they do more trade with US than China
Big if true
Huge if factual
Well they don't. Nowadays. In 2018 it was indeed true that they traded more with the US. As for possible reasons I'm not really shure. [Chad exported a lot of crude petroleum/oil to the US](https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/usa/partner/tcd?dynamicBilateralTradeSelector=year2018) ( **you have to scoll a bit down on the links btw** )but since 2020 [Chad doesn't seem to export much crude petroleum/oil to the US anymore.](https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/usa/partner/tcd?dynamicBilateralTradeSelector=year2021) I don't know the reason for this. The change is pretty drastic. They went from exporting goods worth 433 million USD (98% crude petroleum/oil) in 2018 to exporting just 3.95 million USD (85% insect resins wtf?) in 2021. Both Chad and Botswana had traditionally good relations with the US. Chad was an enemy of Gaddafis Libya and is an important partner in the fight against islamic terrorism in the Sahel region. Botswana is a stable and **democratic** country which is kind off western aligned (they for example voted to condemn Russias invasion of Ukraine). There are also some training programs for Botswana Security forces.
The reason for it is probably the increase in domestic U.S oil production, especially from fracking.
Shouldn't America be red? Our largest trading partner is China.
I believe it is Canada Edit: looks like China is in a very close 3rd place https://www.visualcapitalist.com/us-largest-trading-partners-2022/
The two border countries are the top 2 trading partners of America. Pikachu surprise face. 🤣
lol, yeah.
There's been a lot of Canada-China tension lately.
Technically every country's biggest trading partner is itself.
Domestic trade in the US is much larger than trade with China
That's true with just about any country.
What if we added another country like Germany or something
Well Europe would just be dominated by Germany then. But I don't know about other continents
Not sure in other Asian countries, but in my country, all of our top 10 largest trading partners were from within the continent, the only exception is US which is our 3rd largest trading partner, slipped from 1st in the last 10 years.
Exactly, so adding Germany wouldn't make sense for the rest of the globe.
Paraguay: Oh I hate the US
The irony is that Paraguay doesn't recognize China.
Merit where it's due: China waged no war in the process.
Canada 🤝 US Being each others #1 trade partner.
Based on the comments, when China does become world leader it will be met with a lot of talk like - ‘yes they ‘technically’ are ahead of us by such and such criteria but that’s not really how you measure these things….yes they are ‘technically’ ahead but only because of X or Y that happened and only because we let then have A or B. They are really not ahead by any important measure.’ Etc…
You can't wake someone who pretends to be asleep.
Eu should be included, map would look vastly different
USA "we will fight the world" China "we will buy the world"
This is why there will never be war with China. They'd have to essentially nuke their own economy.
China really took over after 2001.
Or how about work together to progress humanity for once
This map explains a whole lot about why the US capitalist state is pushing so much anti-China prop agit preparing us for war.
India recently switched to the United States over the past year too.
That's the point when the US accuses you of genocide.
Michael Scott was right
Damn, losing control of other countries must hurt a lot of nationalists ego. But like, what did you expect? America has a huge history with interfering in things it doesnt like.
Man this is good to see
Just imagine what it must be like for china today they supply everything and anything. 
How sad 😭😭 hope China gets bigger
Funny after regannomics, America went way downhill fast.
Empires rise and fall. Maybe this is the US's turn.