[beebmam]

If global markets aren't transforming China out of totalitarianism, then morally, shouldn't we stop assisting the economic development of China?

I'm horrified by some of the stories I've been told by my Chinese co-workers. Threats of violence to family members (for speaking freely) by the Chinese government is extremely common.

[yborg]

It's far too late for that. The real question is whether "global markets" will transform the US into a totalitarian state to better compete with China.

[elvirs]

America has killed quite a few million people during its delivering democracy to the desert adventures in just last one decade. Pretty sure its more than what Chinese have done by a magnitude of 10x. Have you considered consuming less American made products?

[woolvalley]

The great leap forward would like to talk to you.

[FreeTradeMess]

So we should boycott american companies for the democracy seeking missions of our government How does that make sense? If you don't like what our leaders are doing, vote and campaign for someone else. That isn't an option for the Chinese people (at least not for those who like to live). The government will only change if they feel a pain in their pocketbook.

[wor3q]

I'm pretty sure, that Syrians didn't elect US government...

[RaceWon]

Consider consuming less USA products? Hmm... No, never, not at all. The truth is no one knows How many people have been killed in China. Another truth is: I can sit here in NY and say Trump is an Idiot who should be Impeached because he is AN ASS and wake up safe and sound in the morning. Try that in China and let me know how that works out for ya.

[elvirs]

forget trump, try calling a state trooper an ass next time you are pulled over and see how that works out for ya:) you are allowed to criticize or insult trump because your criticism or insults hace 0 influence on anything. Regular chinese person talking shit about the govt is taken seriously because thats not something anybody does and will attract a lot of attention from other people and can result in a problem for the govt. if your words had potential to create serious problens for American government you would have been silenced very quickly.

[FreeTradeMess]

I have told troopers that they are rude and doing unnecessary things (when they actually have). I don't mouth off at them or start throwing expletives. How can you be uncivil and not expect trouble anywhere in life? It's called consequences. If your boss at work makes a decision that pisses you off, can you just go off on him and expect to still work there? My guess would be no.

Don't be shitty to people and people usually won't be shitty to you. If they are anyway, put the recorded dash-cam event on YouTube and they will get fired.

[RaceWon]

Umm-- it appeared to me you were trying to bash America (a perfect country?? Hell NO... NOT EVEN CLOSE; lol) my point, as you helped make, was that here I can trash talk the Prez with impunity, pretty much, Anywhere and everywhere. (But I think you knew what I was getting at). Peace :)

[tonyedgecombe]

Perhaps it's because the end result would be both poverty and totalitarianism.

[stretchwithme]

Not necessarily. A country can be prosperous with no foreign trade.

Earth has no foreign trade and extreme poverty there fell by 50% between 2000 and 2012. China is not even an order of magnitude smaller.

[ikeyany]

My understanding is that Earth imports almost 100% of its energy without generating any for export. Would you care to see what happens when its foreign energy supply is truly cut off?

[liberte82]

Make The Sun Great Again, that trade deficit is monstrous, Earth has been taking advantage of us for far too long.

[stretchwithme]

And we are not trading with the sun.

[liberte82]

Even worse, we're just stealing from it!

[stretchwithme]

True of all countries.

[tonyedgecombe]

Either way you might still have totalitarianism.

[stretchwithme]

That's true. Totalitarianism is a function of ideas. And other factors, of course.

Like geography. Earth does not have a totalitarian government for that reason. It's too hard to control the whole thing, while it would be much easier if it were one contiguous flat continent. Probably the reason Europe isn't, but China and Russia are. And why North America may be in the long run (yikes!).

[CogitoCogito]

> If global markets aren't transforming China out of totalitarianism, then morally, shouldn't we stop assisting the economic development of China?

I personally don't see any other way. Either it's this or exploitation. You shouldn't ignore the effects of your trading with China (and all countries). Doing so just legitimizes their actions and is entirely immoral.

[xevb3k]

I think it’s something that should be considered, but it would be useful to provide more than anecdotal support. Are threats of violence really that common? What clear sources are there for that statement?

[nichtich]

The usual. WaPo/NYTimes both did several stories like this. But keep in mind that one result of suppression of free speech is the lack of clear sources. So anecdotal is sometimes the best we got.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/world/asia/china-xinjiang...

[xevb3k]

The article you cite is regarding journalists. While I accept that this is bad, the comment above as I understood it was regarding threats against regular people for speaking freely.

I’m not saying that doesn’t occur, but I would be interested in non-anecdotal sources. If any exist.

[helloindia]

Heard of Google?

[liberte82]

It was all well and good when we were getting good cheap Chinese goods. Now that China is rising, we've all suddenly become humanitarians.

[boznz]

Good luck buying ANYTHING either not made in China or having parts made in China, that ship has well and truly sailed.

[hungerstrike]

Did you ever wonder who created this tyrannical technological monster of a government? I don't think a bunch of Chinese farmers did. The British basically conquered China in the Opium Wars and they owned Hong Kong for 150 years.

It seems to me that external powers have built China into what it is today. Mao Zhedong was installed by a group working through Yale, home of the Skull and Bones. They put him in charge of propaganda and you can see their own article about it here - http://digital.library.yale.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collectio...

Mao went on to murder somewhere between 70 and 100 million Chinese people who threatened the new communist government. Western media never talks about that.

Every nation has given up their technology to China one way or the other. Bill Clinton was accused and tried for selling nuclear secrets to them. Israel regularly funnels military technology to China. So where's this going?

My opinion: This is your next world government, built by shadowy figures who are constantly at work to own every aspect of you life.

[FreeTradeMess]

This is a very fair point. There are so many things that go unmentioned when discussing the consequences (current and long term) of globalism. Particularly a nation state such as China.

Here are a few I can think of:

1. Mass global pollution. Not only transporting materials, but largely unregulated environmental destruction. What would the pollution levels look like today without NAFTA ETC? I muse at how the most ardent environmentalists (pushing for environmental regulation in California ETC) are also often the biggest globalists. A clean planet and Globalism have been proven in the last 25 years to be mutually exclusive.

2. The morality issue that was raised. We have unions and social justice warriors in this country fighting for higher minimum wage, living wage, cheap/free health care, open borders to refugees and any in need, Freedoms of every sort. Politicians run campaigns and voters vote for people because of this stuff, yet they buy 80% of their merchandise from countries that treat their people like human garbage and 20+% of their produce and services from companies employing illegals (who treat them like garbage). What does that say about us? We are virtue seeking people, which boycotting China and other groups doesn't currently recognize? Do we only fight for peoples rights and well being when it won't cost us cheap crap from Walmart or cause the businessman that exploitative but lucrative offshore business. Or do we care only about the plight of US Minorities, but not the far worse off people in China. Our poorest 10% are far freer and better off economically and medically than 90% of them you know? Don't start stating fabricated census garbage to me. I am close friends with people who grew up there and have heard first hand how poor most factory workers are there. Every US citizen with half a heart should be appalled and demanding that we boycott China until they start to treat their people with a shred of human dignity. Their leaders see the citizens there as nothing more than disposable drones who's only mission is to deliver ever more power to the top.

3. We have enabled China to become a world power. People laugh at the thought of China being a military threat to the US. Are you kidding? Do you know the raw manufacturing power of that country? Do you realize that the next war will be fought and won with Drones? (in the millions or perhaps tens of millions). So who do you think can outlast the other? Manufacturing and innovation has always won wars. Good segway...

4. Innovation and intellectual property. So I don't know if you have noticed this, but all of our technology seems to leak out and end up all over China. They clone everything. Are they just really good at reverse engineering things? Well yes, but often they steal (helped by their own government) from us (high tech espionage). They produce counterfeits that compete with out own designed products and flood our own market with them. They even combine stolen research and create superior products to ours. They stole Nuke technology from us for crying out loud, and we just shrugged... Why can't we hold them accountable for these things? When Google was over there, they tried to steal all of their tech at the time. They do it to everybody. When it comes to dealings with other countries, they are lawless. Their own government conspires against us along with wealthy business owners.

5. They manipulate their own currency to force out factories out of existence. Since they don't care about how impoverished their work force is, they can outlast any competitor. Many factories move abroad because of this (just to compete).

6. Since we pay them with American currency, they often buy up our countries bonds, companies, real estate, ETC. How is it good that we have become so dependent on a rouge and untrustworthy, immoral state who owns much of our property and debt?

Is it really worth all that cheap crap we have sitting around in our closets, attics and garages (not to mention landfills) for all of this?

Someone please tell me all the benefits of globalism (particularly with China). Make a convincing argument FOR globalism please.

[jeffbax]

> 1. "A clean planet and Globalism have been proven in the last 25 years to be mutually exclusive."

Actually, the environment is what gets cleaned up as people are lifted out of poverty (which globalism accomplishes better than anything else). See reforestation of Europe, the post-industrial USA, and now even China tackling a severe pollution problem. People need the ability to provide food before they worry about the rest.

> 2. "We have unions and social justice warriors in this country fighting for higher minimum wage, living wage, cheap/free health care, open borders to refugees and any in need, Freedoms of every sort"

Unions began as (fairly racist) mechanisms for preventing labor competition and thus artificially high wages. Minimum wage is not a national issue and causing problems in a lot of places trying to push it too high too fast (and another mechanism, like unions that keep out other laborers / raise the cost of production, that will help some and really punish those kept out).

"Cheap/free healthcare" as I'm guessing you perceive it to be, is more likely pushing the costs higher in a lot of ways through market distortions. US healthcare suffers extreme cost disease as SSC would say, but the cause is primarily driven by government encouraging consumption and restricting supply (similar to housing in major cities)

No idea what you mean about open borders, but it's not generally the left pushing for that. Sanders' platform was rooted in nativism and economic fantasy, like Trump's (cue "Bernie would have won!")

If we care about the poor in China, or elsewhere, we will trade with them and let them plug into the global economy. Period. The last 50-70 years have lifted people out of poverty at an unprecedented rate in human history because of the globalism you decry. Your anecdotes about however difficult factory life might be do not change the reality that the people there have overwhelmingly voted with their feet to take those jobs over the old ones in the field. Change takes time, and holding poorer nations to the strict standards of the first world is counter-productive, cruel, and unawares.

> 3. "We have enabled China to become a world power. People laugh at the thought of China being a military threat to the US. Are you kidding?"

I don't think anyone takes that lightly, certainly not the Pentagon. Still, the US is flush with natural resources, still ahead technologically though that is certainly changing fast and a better trading partner with the world. They still have the upper hand. US manufacturing output has also never been more productive than today, so the "death" of it is overblown. There are fewer jobs because we're able to do more with less, thanks technology.

> 4. "Their own government conspires against us along with wealthy business owners."

Certainly a problem, hopefully our country takes cybersecurity seriously. Still, you want a globalized China because that's the only way to influence them. Trade makes war unlikely, unlike the opposite.

> 5. "Since they don't care about how impoverished their work force is, they can outlast any competitor."

Tell that to the SE Asian economies that are stealing a lot of work from Chinese factories these days?

> 6. "How is it good that we have become so dependent on a rouge and untrustworthy, immoral state who owns much of our property and debt?"

That… doesn't make much sense. They're investing here and abroad, which is generally a good thing. If you haven't noticed, it isn't like the US Government isn't willing to pull things like keeping their tech out of US telecom and such if it need to. If you think an increasingly wealthy country of 1.6 billion people will be prevented from investing globally, its simply nuts.

> "Is it really worth all that cheap crap we have sitting around in our closets, attics and garages"

If you haven't noticed, goods from there and many other developing countries are no longer "cheap crap", it also means that US consumer dollars go much farther. US citizens get more for less, and can allocate more resources away from spending on necessities (or deal with the rising healthcare benefit costs often depressing their wage growth -- though thats another problem)

TLDR: Argument for globalism "Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years"

https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bil...

We won't fix poverty in places by not engaging with them. You don't fix problems w/ governments in India, Africa etc by not engaging with them b/c they don't meet your standard of virtue today. Despite the surveillance state, China in particular is certainly far freer today in 2018 than it was when Mao was murdering 40 million people, and I'd rather that trend continue steadily, if slowly -- just like elsewhere in the world.

You can't just flip a switch, and alienating governments has a pretty poor track record of changing any minds.

[FreeTradeMess]

>"Actually, the environment is what gets cleaned up as people are lifted out of poverty (which globalism accomplishes better than anything else). See reforestation of Europe, the post-industrial USA, and now even China tackling a severe pollution problem. People need the ability to provide food before they worry about the rest."

What I was asking is what was the price that the planet payed to bring China to the place it is now? (What has NAFTA done to the earth?) Was it worth it? Next is India ETC. This planet cannot bear globalism for another 20 years. It's rate is increasing, and the pollution output of up and coming countries will drive us over the edge. Why are environmentalists often also globalists? That is simply illogical.

>"If you haven't noticed, goods from there and many other developing countries are no longer "cheap crap", it also means that US consumer dollars go much farther. US citizens get more for less, and can allocate more resources away from spending on necessities (or deal with the rising healthcare benefit costs often depressing their wage growth -- though thats another problem)"

No, most of it is Cheap crap that we hang on our walls of disposable toys we give to our kids. Materialism is rampant in America. Look at the landfills, Look at Thrift stores, Look at peoples garages and attics. People have 5x the amount of clothes, and stuff that they will ever use or need. This is what I am referring to.

>"Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years"

What does that even mean? Farmers who lived happily off of the land, and had little use for much currency were in poverty. Now they live in a pollution filled death trap and work with no sunlight in a soul-crushing factory job. Is that an improvement in the quality of their lives? Poverty is a very misleading term that is too often used politically.

You aren't answering the moral dilemma except to say that it takes time and that it could be worse. Well that isn't good enough for me. Our behavior is enabling people to be jailed or killed if they want to do things that anyone can do in a Free country. You are downplaying, or not addressing the rest of my concerns. I am not at all convinced that globalism has been a positive thing in the world. All the pollution, all the exploitation, empowering countries that wish to do us harm economically and politically if it benefits them (these are not our friends). Destroying the planet? How can one justify this?

[phil248]

The American president made violent threats to a woman he had an affair with. He suggested people beat up protesters at his rallies. He frequently attacks the free press, judicial system, law enforcement and minority religious and ethnic groups.

And that's just the president. What about US incarceration rates, use of the death penalty and racial bias in law enforcement? Or the frequent, devastating use of military force on populations all over the planet.

I'm not equivocating, just stating some facts that may offer perspective on your suggestion that we diminish the living standards of 1.3 billion people because their government is terrible in different ways than our own.